With the Republican-controlled House and Senate’s failure to extend federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act health insurance program, 24 million ACA or Obamacare enrollees will see their monthly premiums double on average beginning on Jan. 1, causing as many as 5 million policy holders to lose their healthcare coverage.
The Republican party, which has voted to eliminate the ACA more than 60 times since 2010, have repeatedly promised to propose an alternative federal health insurance program, but never have. Instead, President Trump and GOP legislators passed a budget in July that cuts over $1 trillion from Medicaid and Medicare — the largest rollback in health care funding in U.S. history. It’s estimated these cuts will result 10 million people losing their health insurance coverage when the new budget takes effect in December 2026. Four million Americans will also lose access to SNAP food and nutrition benefits. These cuts will benefit the nation’s top 1 percent wealthiest households with over $1 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Alex Lawson, executive director of the group Social Security Works, who talks about the U.S. healthcare crisis that will intensify next year due to the exponential rise in health insurance costs, loss of federal support for hospitals leading to many closures especially in rural America, and rising medical debt. He also discusses potential solutions to repair the nation’s broken healthcare system.
ALEX LAWSON: If you take people’s healthcare away, more people will get sick. People will get sicker. People will die and people will go bankrupt. So that’s what we can expect. Around 5 million people are going to lose their health insurance because they’ll no longer be able to afford it because the Republicans refuse to prevent the premium spikes that are already happening. And as you noted, an average doubling of insurance premiums. Doubling. It’s never happened before that so many Americans have faced such enormous increases in their health, healthcare costs, in their health insurance costs. So we know what’s going to happen. The failure to stop the premium spikes in Obamacare will lead to people dying. And you have to layer that on top of the $1 trillion that the Republicans have cut from Medicaid. That’s done. That’s not in the future—that has happened, and so we’re already seeing hospitals closing or cutting back services.
Usually emergency rooms and maternity wards are the first on the chopping block. And this destruction is just rolling across the country right now. Everyone will get hurt, but it will especially impact people in rural areas. It’ll impact older folks. It’ll kill and harm disproportionately the most vulnerable in our society. So the oldest of the old. Seniors with disabilities, poorer seniors. And what we’re talking about the models for just the Medicaid side is around 51,000 preventable deaths a year from this trillion-dollar cut.
And that number is going to increase when you add in the 5 million who lose their coverage because they can no longer afford it because the Republicans refuse to prevent the premium spikes. It’s really important for people to remember why did they do this? Why are people going to die? Why are we seeing the largest transformation of our healthcare system since Medicare? Also, that the Republicans could give trillions of dollars in tax handouts to billionaires, literally the richest people in the history of the world. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, those billionaires who sat behind President Trump when he was sworn in. He was showing who he’s working for and you know what? He’s working for them extremely hard. The billionaires are making out and the working people in this country are going to pay the price with our health, our wellbeing, and in too many cases, our lives.
SCOTT HARRIS: And Alex, an increasing number of Americans are dissatisfied or horrified with the U.S. healthcare system. Many think it’s completely broken. Is this a moment in your view in U.S. politics where proposals for universal healthcare could gain traction such as the long-running proposal to institute a Medicare for All program, a single-payer program like much of the rest of the developed world has had for decades?
Some of the stuff that really needs to be happening right now is that states are going to be on the hook for enormous health insurance losses. You take California and Washington and Oregon, and they’re looking at the federal government pulling back, and some of these states are going to step up and they’re just going to look at the arithmetic and say, it actually makes more financial sense for our states to offer a single payer state-based system than they can do multiple states, and then maybe we can bring that out to the entire country.
That’s how single-payer was achieved in Canada and I think that that is a good model for us to follow right now. We’re never going to stop fighting for Medicare for all at the federal level, but I do think that there is a lot of interesting and really important work happening at the state level as well.
For more information, visit Social Security Works at socialsecurityworks.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Alex Lawson (17:02) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our“Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
