SCOOP: Sen. Bill Cassidy Trump are “totally in sync” on health care
The Louisiana senator explains why he and Trump are aligned on health care, as the GOP ponders its moves post-Schumer Shutdown.
President Donald Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy are “totally in sync” on health care, the Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee told the Washington Reporter.
As Republicans debate how to address health-care policy following the unprecedented government shutdown, Cassidy explained that he and Trump have similar policy visions.
Trump “wants to take dollars that would go to an insurance company and send them to the individual. And he spoke of doing it through a health savings account. I spoke of doing it through a flexible spending account. As it turns out, that’s more practical,” Cassidy said.
Cassidy, who spent decades as a physician, explained that Trump’s proposal is more practical than what the Senator originally rolled out. “It’s a melding of vision, and to say that it’s a melding implies that there were differences beforehand,” Cassidy said. “This is exactly what he’s expressed and exactly what I was expressing.”
The Louisiana lawmaker’s plan would directly fund Americans’ tax-advantaged health savings accounts, an idea informed in part by his missionary work.
“I worked for 25 years in a hospital, but even before that, my wife and I did mission work in Africa, in Swaziland,” Cassidy said. “And I remember going to a patient who came to us, and he was wearing traditional garb. He was older, had gray hair; he was not westernized, he was an African. And I said ‘I think you have pneumonia, I can do an x-ray that will cost you ten bucks, or I can treat you exactly the same, but I won’t have an x-ray to prove it, but I’ll treat you exactly the same way, whether I have an x-ray or not.’ And he would think about it, and you could see, using his own value system whether he wanted to pay for the x-ray or not pay for the x-ray.”
Cassidy reflects on that anecdote when critics chide him for “giving too many decisions to the patient.” His decades as a doctor led him to a simple belief: “if you treat the patient with respect, and you give her the information she needs, and you give her the power of the pocketbook, she will make the best decision for her value system, for her pocketbook, and for her health, and ultimately we should be about the patient,” he said.
“There’s this kind of patronizing viewpoint that you’ve got to make decisions about the patient for her to be better off, and that’s not my viewpoint, and that’s not my experience working in the settings in which I’ve worked,” he added.
As the GOP decides how to confront the Obamacare subsidy extension debate, Cassidy emphasized the importance of first dollar coverage, which he said is important for deductibles.
“If you give someone a $6,000 deductible, most people will never go through those $6,000,” he explained. “5 percent will go through that $6,000. What you’re really doing with that money is you’re giving it to the insurance company to pay for premiums, but you’re not giving it to the patient to pay for health care. If you give first dollar coverage to the patient, in which if our daughter sprains her ankle and we take her to the Urgent Care center, she’s got that first dollar coverage, that’ll take care of 95 percent of patients that need to have health care after all.”
“It’s also the recognition that most people don’t get in car wrecks, but they do have lumps and bumps,” Cassidy said. “And if you can help pay for that, that’s better for their pocketbook. So give the patient the power, recognize that that deductible sometimes is just insurmountable, give them first dollar coverage, and that’s a health care policy that really works for them.”