Trump Delayed a Medicare Change After Health Company Donations

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/us/politics/trump-medicare-bandages-donors.html

Trump Delayed a Medicare Change After Health Company Donations
The president posted talking points provided by one firm that donated millions, and his administration delayed a change on coverage of pricey bandages that could have hurt the company and others like it.
By Kenneth P. Vogel, Sarah Kliff and Katie Thomas
Aug. 7, 2025 Updated 2:02 p.m. ET

Oliver Burckhardt came prepared for the dinner that President Trump hosted for a small group of major donors at his private Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida on March 1.

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.”

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.

For Extremity Care, the influence campaign was money well spent.

It helped secure support at the highest levels of the U.S. government to protect an important revenue stream for companies that sell skin substitutes to doctors, who use the products to heal stubborn wounds. 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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Incredible return on $5 million investment