Georgia Congressman Tom Price, the author of one of the most thorough Republican proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the transition announced Tuesday morning.
Price, an orthopedic surgeon, will assume his new role already with a blueprint to supplant the controversial health care law: his own “Empowering Patients First Act,” which provides for age-based tax credits, sets a limit on tax exclusion of employer-sponsored coverage, and creates individual and small employer membership association and association health plans to allow for interstate insurance markets.
As Vox writes, Price is “the HHS secretary you’d pick if you were serious about dismantling” the ACA.
At the same time, the transition announced that Trump had chosen Seema Verma, a health policy consultant who designed Indiana’s Obamacare Medicaid expansion program under President-elect Mike Pence, to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Through her firm SVC Inc., Verma has advised a slate of other GOP governors in conservative workarounds to Medicaid expansion, including employment requirements and health savings accounts.
We’ve examined previously in this space the procedural and political hurdles to repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, but Tuesday’s nominations mark the clearest indication yet of the president-elect’s enduring commitment to undo his predecessor’s signal achievement.
