President-elect Trump will meet Wednesday with Zeke Emanuel, a healthcare policy expert who helped write Obamacare and has been particularly critical of Republican efforts to repeal it.
Emanuel previously served as a senior adviser to President Obama on healthcare and now chairs the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. The key Obamacare architect has urged Trump to preserve the healthcare legislation he helped create, and told CNN last month that repealing the law would create “an inefficient disaster” that could cost Americans $25 billion.
Emanuel became controversial during the effort to pass Obamacare by suggesting that the law might require health benefits to be rationed out to people based on their age, which ultimately prompted former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to say the law would set up “death panels” that might deny care or certain procedures to people.
Still, Trump’s team seemed to welcome the meeting, and said it was taking ideas from all quarters about how to improve the nation’s healthcare system.
“The president-elect has been very clear that Obamacare needs to be repealed and replaced,” Trump transition spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Wednesday morning. “This continues to show the open mind at which he approaches all of these problems.”
Spicer said Trump has benefited from meeting with “all sorts of people that he agrees with, disagrees with,” and is likely to have a productive conversation with Emanuel.
“If they can make our healthcare system better in terms of affordability and sensibility, he’s going to want to hear their ideas,” Spicer said.
Emanuel has also suggested that Trump might be able to play a constructive role when it comes to healthcare.
“Trump could cause the GOP Congress to stop strangling Obamacare and instead to implement changes that would fix it,” he said in an interview with Salon. “This would restore stability to the health care system. Trump would be celebrated for this achievement.”
While Emanuel has said the “publicity” around Obama’s signature healthcare law was “a mistake,” he still believes the legislation has been a “very big success and an improvement on the American healthcare system.”
He told CNN earlier this month that Republicans “have never given a proposal that has done better.”
Trump has previously said he is open to preserving parts of the sweeping healthcare law, including allowing young adults to remain on their parent’s insurance plan until age 26 and keeping the pre-existing conditions clause.
