NCPA CEO Douglas Hoey was invited to attend a roundtable hosted by President Donald Trump (R) last week at the White House focused on the Rural Health Transformation (RHT) Program. Trump opened the event with comments on the program and health care more generally, and thanked the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists in the room for their attendance. The president's comments were followed by remarks from other attendees, including Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who said that "we need to go after the PBMs and make sure that the insurance companies are not owning providers and owning PBMs. That is what is driving up the cost of health care in this country."
During the event, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz noted that every state received first-year awards, averaging $200 million each, under the RHT Program. NCPA has worked with our partners to encourage the governors of all 50 states to leverage pharmacists in the programs and proposals when applying to the RHT program. As part of that effort, NCPA launched a community pharmacy research library, which includes published papers, outcome metrics, payment and policy analyses, and implementation tools that can be cited in the state proposals.
Additionally, the event included discussion of TrumpRx — a website that's expected to aggregate discount programs for patients to shop in one place — and is expected to go live this month.
Also in attendance were Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), and Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), some of whom also delivered remarks on the program and other issues around rural health care.
The roundtable follows the announcement last week of the administration's "Great Health Care Plan." You can read our qAM coverage on that here.
