AARP CEO: Trumpcare needs these 4 basic principles
At the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jo Ann Jenkins, the CEO of AARP, outlined what the interest group wants out of the Affordable Care Act’s replacement—or Trumpcare.
AARP, an advocacy group for Americans 50 and older, “certainly did endorse the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) because it was around four or five of our basic principles that we wanted to make sure people had health insurance in the first place,” she told Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous in an interview.
Those four principles will be familiar to most people: not declining coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, letting adult children up to age 26 stay on their parents’ plan, closing the prescription drug Medicare “donut hole”—after a certain point of buying drugs, insurance pauses until you hit a spending limit—and ensuring that the burden doesn’t come down inordinately on older people.
“For us at AARP, our members want us to be there making sure that whatever comes out of the new Congress and president has those things as key,” said Jenkins. “And in addition to that, that the age rating is taken into effect, so that those insurance companies are not charging older people 10 times more than they’d charge someone who’s younger.”
Jenkins’ remarks coincided with an open letter from AARP to President-elect Donald Trump. In the letter, Jenkins stressed the issue of costly prescription drugs, which disproportionately affects many seniors due to treatment of chronic conditions and touted Trump’s call for letting Medicare negotiate drug prices.
“AARP supports providing the Secretary of Health and Human Services with the authority to negotiate lower drug prices on behalf of millions of Medicare beneficiaries,” writes Jenkins. “In addition, we agree with you that we should reduce barriers to better pricing competition worldwide by allowing for the safe importation of lower priced drugs.”
In her letter, Jenkins also laid out expectations for Medicaid, one of the key safety nets for seniors along with Social Security. “Efforts to reduce or cap Medicaid funding could endanger the health, safety, and care of millions of individuals who depend on the essential services provided through this program,” she warned. “Furthermore, caps would likely result in overwhelming cost-shifts to state governments unable to shoulder the costs of care without sufficient federal support.”
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.
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