Decoding JD Vance’s Healthcare Policy

With JD Vance recently announced as Trump's running mate, many are seeking answers to where he stands on issues such as the opioid crisis, abortion, access to care, and the overall healthcare industry.

Does his record, opinions, and voting history provide insights into his potential impacts if elected as vice president?

In this episode of CareTalk, David E. Williams and John Driscoll explore how JD Vance’s views could impact his campaign and what a potential vice presidency might mean for the future of healthcare policy and reform.

TOPICS
0:19 Sponsorship
1:24 Who is JD Vance?
2:23 How will JD Vance impact healthcare policy?
4:30 Understanding Vance's views on abortion
5:40 How will Trump's governing style mesh with Vance?
6:57 Understand possible policies on DACA and healthcare
8:08 Vance's history with the opioid crisis
8:59 Why was Vance picked as Trump's running mate
9:41 Revisiting the East Palestine disaster

This episode is brought to you by Matrix Medical Network.

Matrix Medical Network is an independent, at-scale provider of comprehensive in-home health assessments. The company’s national network of nearly 3,000 clinicians delivers comprehensive, personalized care for Medicare Advantage, Managed Medicaid, and Commercial patients across all 50 states.

Care visits include diagnostic testing, risk identification, medication management, and tailored lifestyle improvement plans.

Download Matrix Medical Network's White Paper: "Improving Health Equity Through Whole-Person Care."

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CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy.

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Transcript

0:00

JD Vance has gone from hillbilly to senator to VP candidate pretty darn quickly. What are his views on healthcare and what do they mean for the country, especially if he's one heartbeat from the presidency? This episode of Care Talk is brought to you by Matrix Medical Network. Matrix Medical Network pioneered the first national in -home clinical network nearly 25 years ago, and today is an independent provider of in -home health assessments serving people across the nation. The company's national network of nearly 3 ,000 clinicians delivers comprehensive personalized care for Medicare Advantage, managed Medicaid, and commercial patients across all 50 states. Care visits include diagnostic testing. risk identification, medication management, and tailored lifestyle improvement plans. Welcome to Care Talk, America's home for incisive debate about healthcare business and policy. I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group. And I'm John Driscoll, senior advisor at Walgreens. Well, join the fast growing Care Talk community on LinkedIn, where you can dig deep into healthcare business and policy topics, access Care Talk content, and interact with the hosts and our guests. I don't think he can interact with JD Vance there, but who knows? Please be sure to leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify while you're at it. So David, talk to me a little bit about who is JD Vance? Well, JD Vance came to people's attention as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, John. He grew up in the Hillbilly region and was a kind of an interpreter that people could say, let me understand all these Trump voters. And so that's how he came to fame and then he got some famous people interested in him. He ended up being a Senator and now he's VP. I understand he's a very flexible guy, on policy. Well, JD Vance, combat veteran, Yale grad, grew up in Appalachia and almost remarkably through a battlefield conversion to Trumpism and MAGA gained Trump's elected to the Senate. think David, he's only been in the Senate. He's only been in the electoral office for 18 months. Yeah. He's a, know, how do we think he might influence health care policy? Well, John, the, in the, know, we have one Trump administration to look back on with fondness or not. And one of things that we saw there was that, Mike Pence, who was the vice president, at the time, had a significant impact on health care policy. I don't think Trump gives a rat's you know what about policy. And so he lets other people deal with it. Vice President in that case, you know, picked people from his home state of Indiana, Alex Azar and Seema Verma, two top people in health care. So I think that I think that Vance could certainly have a big role. And then the question is, what's that role going to be? Well, and Vance at least has a record in being radically against gender affirming care after he was apparently for gender affirming care for one of his colleagues based on one of his classmates recently released texts. He was, I think, for women's right to choose with some restrictions. Now he's completely against women's right to choose. So when you talk about flexibility, we're talking about flexibility in the extreme around at least health care policy for prospective vice presidential nominee and vice presidential candidate fans? Sure, John. I think especially given how old the Republican nominee will be when he takes office, if he were to take office, is that there's a pretty high likelihood that the vice president would end up actually serving. So it's not like somebody changed their view, John, if they like purple today and yellow tomorrow or vanilla ice cream one day and chocolate the next. This could matter, you know, if when it comes to things like abortion, where he's been sometimes very, very strict, including, you know, without an exception to say, hey, you know, rape incest, that doesn't really matter the circumstances. It's why should the child be deprived the right to be out in the world? I mean, if that's the view that has some pretty radical implications. Now, right now, just to be clear, he I think was for abortion. and the Roman's right to choose with some exceptions. Then he went to an extreme position, I think assuming that that's where MAGA and Trump were. He didn't check with President Trump because President Trump does not actually agree with that position of banning abortion without any exceptions, including rape and incest. And so now he is back to sort of a moderated position. I think that the challenge in thinking about an 18 -month senator who started as a moderate, ran against Trump as unfit, then embraced him, then ran ahead of him, and now is running back. It's going to be really hard to pin him down, David. Well, John, what I'm looking forward to actually is this isn't exactly health care policy, but we could make a bet, John, on whether Trump will turn on him publicly. blame him perhaps even before the election for whatever mishaps he may encounter. Well, I think the thing we need to monitor is exactly what you said about Trump, for example, whether it was COVID or drug prices or anything related to healthcare, he tended to delegate and then disappear as a president with regard to healthcare policy and issues. And we're going to have to look very carefully if he becomes Well, as he develops his policies and articulates them as a nominee, again, it's unclear where Trump stands between Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's rather extreme conservative view or his own somewhat creative policy creation on the fly, where that lands, what we really have to do is look at the people around him and who's advising him in order to determine where healthcare policy might Let's look at a couple of things that he's actually done in the Senate in that brief timeframe. Yeah, it's interesting that he's not the only one to have served a short term in the Senate and then run for higher office. President Obama also was a first term Senator when he ran. Now, of course, his previous job had been as a constitutional law professor. So he knew something about the constitution and so on. And perhaps Vance does as well. On immigrant care, Vance is a proud sponsor of a bill to deny coverage to DACA recipients. Those are the people that are the deferred action who are here in the US under this sort of temporary status. The DACA recipients are mostly people that were brought here early on as children. And there's 700 ,000 or so that don't have a clear right to be in the US. Now they have been able to get healthcare coverage in some cases. And there's an explicit bill to say, let's actually take people off of that coverage, which is about 700 ,000 people. It's just economically stupid, John, among other things. A farmer pricing is a topic we discuss a lot here on the show. And he was supportive of price negotiation in 2022, but he's actually since backed off on that. He probably actually fits with Trump there, who in his first term of office did talk about negotiating and taking in sort of the lowest international price that was offered. And then John, opioids, where does opioids fit in to Vans both from a personal standpoint and from a policy standpoint? Well, I think in the case of opioids, a lot of the hillbilly elegy goes into the examples of how many people in the poorer parts of Appalachia that you grew up in. are addicted opioids, including his mother who's now been clean for a number of years. So I think that where issues really come close to him personally, he actually, I think is more articulate about what can and should happen. mean, certainly the derailment in East Palestine and the poisoning that happened and the healthcare risks that happened, he can react pretty quickly and I think from the heart on issues that touch him personally. Other than that, think... It's sort of whatever happens to be coming out of Trump's mouth. mean, the reason why I think he was chosen was alignment and aggressive alignment with whatever Trump's MAGA agenda was at the time. I think that flexibility may get him into trouble and we may be in a situation where given how... how challenged his popularity is nationally. You might be right there. may be, there may be another nominee coming because he doesn't really have a grounded base or a clear set of policy points that he's stuck to. Well, let's say for sure that Trump wouldn't have picked him if he knew that he was going to be running against Kamala Harris. Maybe we'll end just by a little bit more about this train derailment, picking up on your point, John, that he on areas that he's personally involved with, you he has some coherence. So there was this derailment, people were poisoned, as you say, and he's pushed for more benefits for victims, including a bigger settlement. And interestingly, he's pushed for the implementation of what they call an obscure provision of the Affordable Care Act, which as a Republican, he would generally be against, which can provide Medicare benefits to those that are exposed to these sort of dangers. And God forbid, he wants more supervision. the rail industry, which I don't think it's going to get them anywhere too fast in the grand old party. No, indeed. The largest individual giver is a guy named a reclusive billionaire named Timothy Mellon, who has gotten into all kinds of trouble by running a railroad that eventually sold that broke a number of different, I mean, of the rules and regulations that JD actually wants to enforce. there's a little bit of the, you could run into some challenges on consistency there too, David, but I think we'll have to, we'll have to just watch how this emerges and maybe return to it as a hot topic on where does JD Vance stand today and where is he going to stand tomorrow? Well, I'm He might be standing right in the middle of the track, John. And I don't know whether the train is going to stop for him. Well, that's it for yet another episode of Care Talk. We've been speaking today about JD Vance. current candidate for Vice President of the United States of America. I'm David Williams, President of Health Business Group. And I'm John Driscoll, Senior Advisor at Walgreens. If you like what you heard or you didn't, please subscribe on your favorite service.