Emily Ward reports for the Washington Examiner on the role of prominent right-of-center think tanks in helping the Trump administration develop a workable alternative to Obamacare.
The White House is quietly working on a healthcare policy proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.
While it is not clear how far along the process is, work on a proposal has been going on for months. The effort appears to belie criticism that Trump’s decision to restart the debate on healthcare, an issue Democrats used to their advantage in the 2018 midterms, was an error committed without forethought.
“The White House, mainly through the National Economic Council, has been engaged on thinking about health care reform for a while now, and they have been engaged with a group of center-right health policy groups to talk about various proposals and ideas,” a conservative health policy analyst told the Washington Examiner.
The analyst said the administration has been “having conversations” on healthcare policy and has reached out to numerous think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the Mercatus Center, and the Hoover Institute.
“They’ve had conversations for the last several months and as recently as a few weeks ago,” the analyst said. “Before the president said what he said, they’d been consistently focused on working on a healthcare plan.”
