Trump Delayed a Medicare Change After Health Companies’ Donations

A week earlier, one of Mr. Burckhardt’s biotech companies had
donated $5 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump political committee,
that paved the way for him to attend the event.

At the dinner, Mr. Burckhardt got a chance to speak briefly to the
president and other guests about himself and the work of his
company, Extremity Care, which makes pricey medical products
including paper-thin bandages made of dried bits of placenta,
according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity
to describe the private event. He also brought copies of a flier urging
the Trump administration to reverse a plan to restrict Medicare
reimbursement for the bandages and criticizing former President
Joseph R. Biden Jr. for having “rammed through a policy that would
create more suffering and death for diabetic patients on Medicare.”

The next morning, Mr. Trump posted the flier on his social media site.

It was not just symbolic.

About one month later, the Trump administration announced it would
delay until next year the Biden administration plan to limit Medicare’s
coverage of the bandages, known as skin substitutes, saying that it
was reviewing its policies.

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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that manages the health care programs, has described the growth in spending on the skin substitutes products as unprecedented, attributing it largely to “abusive pricing practices.”

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Since April, the month when the Biden-initiated change would have otherwise gone into effect, Medicare has paid doctors and other medical providers more than $2.3 billion for skin substitutes, according to an analysis that Early Read AI, a health care data analytics company based in Lincolnshire, Ill., conducted for The New York Times.

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