Former President Donald Trump, who’ll be campaigning in Iowa tomorrow, says he still wants to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with something better, but Senator Chuck Grassley suggests Senate Republicans have little interest in reviving the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“Getting down the cost of health care generally — that’s all I hear about,” Grassley says.
President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010. Trump endorsed a plan to undo regulations in the law and end the federal subsidies to individuals buying private insurance, but that failed in the U.S. Senate in 2017. Grassley, who voted for the repeal in 2017, said it “would be nice to have Trump “tune in” to some of the “stuff” Senate Republicans are focused on now.
“The only thing I hear about health care in the United States Senate and it’s been this way probably since 2018, going back to when Trump was still president, is we’ve got to do something about prescription drugs, do something about rural health care — getting more doctors to practice in rural America,” Grassley says, “get more doctors trained in the United States, as well as more by immigration.”
Grassley has been working on bipartisan legislation to crack down on pharmacy benefit managers which critics say unfairly drive up prices and are driving rural pharmacies out of business.