Tea at Trianon: Congress Should Enact Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan Now

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 19, 2026

Congress Should Enact Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan Now

From Amuse on X:

The American healthcare system presents a familiar puzzle. It absorbs nearly $5T each year, yet ordinary patients rarely know what care will cost, why prices differ so wildly, or who is accountable when costs rise without corresponding improvements in outcomes. Conservatives have long diagnosed the problem correctly. It is not that Americans spend too little on healthcare. It is that spending is insulated from market discipline, obscured by intermediaries, and structured to protect incumbents rather than patients. President Donald J Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan is best understood as a systematic attempt to reverse those distortions by restoring agency to patients and accountability to providers, insurers, and drug manufacturers.
Begin with prescription drugs. Americans pay more for the same medications than patients in other developed countries. This is not an accident of chemistry or logistics. It is the predictable result of a pricing system in which the largest buyer in the world, the US government, refuses to negotiate as aggressively as smaller foreign systems and allows manufacturers to segment markets to maximize revenue. Trump’s Most-Favored-Nation framework cuts directly through this structure. The principle is simple. Americans should not subsidize lower prices abroad. If a drug company is willing to sell a medication for a given price in Germany or Japan, it can sell it for that price here.
Critics often respond that such an approach risks innovation. But this objection confuses incentives. Innovation depends on expected returns across global markets, not on extracting monopoly rents from one population while offering discounts to another. By anchoring US prices to verified international benchmarks, the Great Healthcare Plan forces manufacturers to compete on efficiency and value rather than political leverage. The experience of Trump’s first term insulin reforms and the Administration’s recent voluntary negotiations confirms the point. Prices fell. Access expanded. Innovation did not collapse. (Read more.)