Kamala Harris and proponents of Medicare for All sell a vision of compassion, but there’s nothing compassionate about limiting patients’ access to doctors and drugs, Joel White told host Mike Slater on Breitbart News Daily.
White, President of Horizon Government Affairs and a Republican strategist, said rising healthcare costs sparked by the Biden-Harris Administration’s signature legislative achievement are increasing costs and reducing the quality of healthcare for those most in need. He believes the current administration sold the American people a false bill of goods.
“Most voters think of this as a green energy bill, right, or a tax bill,” White said of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but the bill also included “a significant change to Medicare that is wreaking havoc on prescription drug costs for seniors.”
He said while the Biden-Harris Administration promised price negotiation authority would decrease costs by lowering drug costs, the resulting high premiums have instead devastated seniors.
“Really what people are experiencing is high premiums – just like high inflation, their premiums are up by double digits,” he said. “Their cost sharing, what they pay for drugs at the pharmacy counter is way up, and their planned choices, their choice of what they can get their drug benefit through, is way down. It’s really just a disaster for seniors right now. The market is very unstable, and it’s unclear how we lift the plane up out of this nose dive.”
White said with premiums for Medicare patients soaring, plan costs will increase by 179% next year. One of the most significant factors is the IRA’s changes to Medicare Part D. White originally helped design Part D, which was written into law in 2003.
“That benefit has been very popular because it’s been very successful,” he said. “Costs have steadily decreased over time – people pay a premium for a health plan, that health plan offers prescription drug benefits, which the senior then picks up at the pharmacy. Those costs over the last 15 years have steadily decreased on average, and you can’t look at another healthcare program where that’s true.”
But the IRA “kind of radically rewrote the Part D benefit – much more government-run, government-controlled, and the cost of those plans have increased,” he said.
“The way they wrote the law is they put all this risk on health insurers,” White explained about changes in the IRA. “The health insurers are now raising their premiums to manage that risk, and it’s a direct cause of the law. What we saw in 2024 is premiums were up on average 21%. In 2025 premiums will go up by 23%. That reflects that 180% increased risk on the health plan.”
The IRA’s changes reversed positive Trump administration-era trends, he said.
“When compared to the Trump years, in Part D, the drug plan costs went down by 12%. Not just the rate of increase didn’t go up as high – they went down in absolute terms by 12%,” White said. “People were paying lower monthly premiums every year under President Trump. Since this law took effect, people’s premiums have almost doubled.”
If current trends continue, the typical American family will spend 40% of its income on healthcare by 2030, he said.
“Just like all other things in the economy – eggs, rent, utilities – costs have been increasing faster than wages. For a couple years, it went down. But in general, the trend in the last two decades is that what you pay for a premium, what you pay for a hospital visit, a prescription at a pharmacy, has increased much faster than our wages. And so in relative terms, our ability to afford coverage is shrinking, and the median family in 2030 will pay about 40% all-in — premiums, what they’re paying out of pocket, and what they pay for the things that insurance doesn’t cover.”
He says with 93% of Americans having some form of health insurance and costs continuing to rise, the talk has moved from the expansion of coverage to affordability.
“Most people have coverage. They’re paying very high premiums, but out of pocket costs are also up,” he said. “And so if we have coverage and we’re paying more out of pocket, we’ve got to look at how adequate is our insurance, and what is that covering for us? And what we’re seeing in Medicare, again under the Inflation Reduction Act, is people are paying more for a benefit that’s charging more out of pocket. There’s fewer choice of plans. Your deductibles are doubling between ’24 and ’25, and you have less access to drugs.”
Medicare for All would accelerate the rapid deterioration of the quality of the program, hurting those most in need who are dependent on Medicare, while giving government more control, White says.
“It’s a vision of two different health systems, right? Two different Americas,” he told Slater. “The Harris vision is more government programs, more people in those government programs, and tighter government control over how we get and pay for health care.”
White says Medicare for All is “couched in the terms of, you know, it’s more compassionate.” He warned that Medicaid begun as an effort to help low-income pregnant women, but expanded to eventually cover 90 million people, serves as a cautionary tale for what is being done to Medicare.
“The challenge of Medicaid is you can’t go see a doctor, right?” he said. “Few doctors will take Medicaid patients,” adding “if you’re on Medicaid and you need to go see a doctor, what you do is end up at the emergency room because no doctor will see you, and that’s why – they aren’t bad people, they just have to go to the emergency room when their kid has an ear ache.”
Despite the lessons of Medicaid’s “slow creep,” Democrats are barreling forward off a cliff with Medicare too, White said.
“We call it compassion, but it’s not compassion to give someone an insurance card and no access to a doctor or to a drug, right?” he said. “We see this in Obamacare too – very narrow access to doctors in those plans.”
“So the history of government-run programs, government-run healthcare, is not good,” White summarized.” I think what we’re seeing in Medicare is going from a market-based, incentive-driven model where people are getting the coverage they need – they love the coverage, it’s cheap, the costs are going down over time – to more of a government-run, government-managed program, and the effects are devastating, right? These premiums are up, out of pocket costs are up, choices are down.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
