President Trump Fixes Biden’s Mess on Medicare Drug Premiums

The corporate media and elected Democrats are once again firing up the liberal outrage machine over the recently announced changes to Medicare drug plan subsidies. But the Trump administration is doing the right thing by fixing what the Biden administration broke. The hysterical reaction from the left should be seen for what it is – nothing more than another shameful election-season scare tactic.

As The Wall Street Journal reported this week, the Trump administration will end a Biden-era subsidy program for Medicare Part D plans after 2026, ending billions in additional annual payments currently flowing to private insurance companies.

Medicare Part D, created in 2003, provides outpatient prescription drug coverage through private plans. Beneficiaries in traditional Medicare can purchase stand-alone Part D plans, while Medicare Advantage plans often bundle prescription drug coverage with other benefits. Roughly 25 million Americans currently have stand-alone Part D coverage, with the average premium running about $36 per month this year.

Contrary to some of the more frenzied claims circulating online, the Trump administration is not “ending” Medicare Part D, eliminating prescription drug coverage, or stripping seniors of their benefits. It is ending a temporary Biden administration program that used billions of taxpayer dollars to artificially suppress premiums for purely political purposes.

According to administration estimates reported by the Journal, roughly 25 percent of Part D enrollees will see their premiums remain flat or decline next year. Another 30 percent are expected to see monthly increases of less than $10. Among the remaining 45 percent, most increases are projected to fall between $11 and $20 per month.

Moreover, administration officials say seniors facing larger increases will have other lower-cost options available to them. The White House says Part D beneficiaries in every region of the country have access to at least three prescription drug plans with total monthly premiums of $50 or less.

Predictably, liberals are using the change as a cudgel against President Trump and Republicans while blatantly misconstruing what the administration is actually doing.

Kendall Witmer, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, charged that Trump and Republicans “are doing everything they can to make health care unaffordable for Americans, especially for seniors.”

Leslie Dach, chairman of the left-wing advocacy organization Protect Our Care, similarly accused the administration of “eliminating a key program that helps seniors afford their medications.”

The California Democratic Party went even further, posting on social media that Trump is “ending” Medicare Part D – an obviously false characterization designed to frighten seniors into believing their prescription drug coverage is disappearing altogether.

What these criticisms ignore, however, is why the subsidy existed in the first place.

The answer is Biden’s notoriously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act.”

That 2022 law capped Medicare beneficiaries’ annual out-of-pocket prescription drug costs while shifting substantially more of the financial burden onto insurers. Unsurprisingly, insurers responded by projecting much higher premiums as the new requirements took effect. Notice of those increased premiums would have hit seniors’ mailboxes in October 2024 – just weeks before Election Day.

To prevent that from happening, the Biden administration in July 2024 announced a nationwide “demonstration project” designed to “stabilize” Part D premiums by funneling more federal money to insurers. In layman’s terms, Biden gave a boatload of taxpayer dollars to big insurance companies to stop them from raising premiums as a result of his own signature spending bill. The Journal Editorial Board called the scheme what it was: “A Medicare election bribe for seniors.”

But the new subsidies were totally unsustainable. Everyone, including the Biden administration, knew it.

The simple truth is that seniors are taxpayers, too. So are their children and grandchildren. Moving billions of dollars from one government ledger to another does not make those costs disappear. According to the Government Accountability Office, the “demonstration” pumped an estimated $6.2 billion into the Part D market in 2025 and another $3.6 billion in 2026 – nearly $10 billion in just two years.

Despite all that additional taxpayer money, the number of stand-alone Part D plans offered nationwide has fallen as insurers have pulled back from the market.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz summarized the Trump administration’s case succinctly. “The Biden admin gave BILLIONS of taxpayer money DIRECTLY to Big Insurance Companies,” Oz wrote on X. “This is unacceptable. We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed.”

There are also signs that insurers had begun responding to the program’s incentives exactly as one might expect. An administration official told the Journal that the subsidies encouraged insurers to increase their rates because they knew the federal government would absorb part of the cost. The official also said that, had the program continued next year, more than half of the subsidy money would have flowed to a single company – UnitedHealth Group.

That is hardly a viable prescription for lowering health care costs.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pursuing other avenues to lower prescription drug prices, including most-favored-nation pricing agreements, and TrumpRx, which has already saved Americans more than $700 million.

None of this means every senior will pay less in 2027. Some Medicare Part D beneficiaries will indeed face moderate premium increases, and seniors should carefully compare available plans during open enrollment.

But portraying those increases as Trump arbitrarily “cutting Medicare” gets the story exactly backward. Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration changed Part D in a way that drove up insurers’ costs, then spent billions of taxpayer dollars to conceal much of the resulting premium increases. Now they want voters to blame Trump for ripping off their multibillion-dollar Band-Aid.

Ultimately, Biden’s “demonstration project” is just another expensive and unsustainable government program that Democrats want to shirk accountability for. While President Trump is cleaning up Biden’s mess, Democrats are simply trying to prevent voters from noticing who made it in the first place.