Political strategist Ned Ryun credited President Donald Trump with lowering prescription drug prices on “Fox & Friends First” Tuesday, but said he still has to tackle pricing transparency to decrease deductibles and premiums.
“What’s interesting is you start to look into that [Fox News] poll and 65 percent said [health care] is the number one issue because of affordability concerns. And then 40 percent said it was the number one issue because they were fearful of a government takeover of the health care industry, and Donald Trump is right,” Ryun said. “Democrats have said our answer to this solution is Medicare for all.”
“Even if we were to double our current taxes, it still wouldn’t cover the cost for Medicare for all.” (RELATED: John Kasich Claims Trump Is Responsible For The Division That’s Tearing America Apart)
Ryun said Republicans must embrace the issue of health care on the campaign trail and advised Trump to expose the industry to market forces and create a pricing change.
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“I’m quietly optimistic they’re going to keep the House and they’re going to gain seats in the Senate. They need to lean into this,” he added. “The first thing they need to do is make sure that they permanently do away with the health insurance tax … The other thing that they need to do is they need to expose the health care industry to market forces — Donald Trump is doing an excellent job on prescription drug prices, but they need to talk about pricing transparency.”
Ryun predicted a drop in costs and said any hospital exceeding $20 million in annual revenue should be subject to the change.
“One of the reasons we’re seeing premiums and deductibles go up is because I don’t think the health care industry is truly exposed to market forces,” he said.
“I don’t think most people understand most of our hospitals are nonprofits. They are not exposed to these market forces. They continue to raise prices. Pricing transparency would be essentially any nonprofit offering services and exceeding $20 million in revenue every year would then have to post their prices for procedures.”
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