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"Medicare shouldn’t have premiums... or copays or deductibles," said US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. "Medicare should cover vision, dental, and hearing. And Medicare should cover everyone."
With much of the nation's focus on skyrocketing Affordable Care Act costs, the Trump administration recently announced a Medicare Part B premium increase of nearly 10% for next year—an amount that will swallow a significant chunk of Social Security recipients' already paltry cost-of-living boost.
The monthly premium for recipients of Medicare Part B, the insurance portion of the program, will be $202.90 next year—a $17.90 increase compared to 2025. The increase will push the monthly premium above $200 for the first time in the program's history.
Jeanne Lambrew, director of healthcare reform at The Century Foundation, wrote in an analysis last week that the $17.90-per-month Medicare premium increase will effectively wipe out 33% of next year's Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which was 2.8%—or $53.76 monthly.
"This is the greatest erosion of the COLA in nearly a decade," Lambrew observed. "The Medicare premium increase is the highest in four years, the projected employer-sponsored insurance increase is the highest in fifteen years, and the health insurance marketplace premium increase for 2026 is the highest out-of-pocket cost increase for all types of coverage in history."
To proponents of Medicare for All—a proposal that would provide comprehensive health coverage to everyone in the US for free at the point of service, for a lower overall cost than the status quo—rising premiums across the for-profit US healthcare system provide yet another reason for urgent, transformational change.
"Medicare shouldn’t have premiums... or copays or deductibles," Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. "Medicare should cover vision, dental, and hearing. And Medicare should cover everyone."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the Senate, bashed Republicans for their willingness to entertain a range of healthcare proposals "except one."
"They will never acknowledge that healthcare is a human right—to be guaranteed to ALL," the senator wrote on Monday, the day President Donald Trump was expected to unveil a patchwork healthcare proposal aimed at averting an Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidy disaster of the GOP's making.
But the White House postponed the rollout as the plan—which reportedly would have extended the ACA tax credits for two years while imposing new limits on the program—faced pushback from Republicans on Capitol Hill. The president's proposal also reportedly included a scheme to push Americans into higher-deductible plans.
"Trump, facing collapsing polling and a potential riot-inducing scenario on health insurance, might have backed off temporarily on the longstanding Republican tendency to ruin the healthcare system so rich people can have more tax cuts," The American Prospect's David Dayen and Ryan Cooper wrote Tuesday. "But he’s still ruining the healthcare system, make no mistake, just a bit more stealthily. This has always been the GOP approach to healthcare, and it’s not going anywhere."
"Healthcare is becoming unsustainable under Trump," says one progressive politician running for US Senate. "Medicare for All would fix it."
The Trump administration came under fire on Sunday after sending Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, onto CNN's weekend news show to try to explain the Republican Party's elusive "solution" to the nation's healthcare crisis, a topic of much interest in recent weeks amid the longest government shutdown in the nation's history and growing fears over massive premium increases or loss of coverage for tens millions of Americans.
Asked during his appearance to explain what Republicans are considering to address the surging cost of healthcare, Oz talked about direct cash payments—something Trump himself has floated in recent weeks—as well as the idea of health saving accounts (or HSAs) which allow for personalized accounts set up to help pay for out-of-pocket medical needs, though not premium payments.
"If you had a check in the mail, you could buy the insurance you thought was best for you," Oz stated without explaining in what way that is different from people who received tax credits to purchase plans on the insurance exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act signed into law by former President Barack Obama.
Pushing such empty ideas while claiming them as viable solutions to soaring costs is partly what led critics like Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) this week to issue a public service announcement which stated flatly: "There is no Republican health care plan"—despite repeated claims to the contrary by GOP lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Dr Oz: "If you had a check in the mail, you could buy the insurance you thought was best for you" pic.twitter.com/rLoMdxhNPV
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 16, 2025
"Dr. Oz a few years ago was pitching Medicare Advantage for All—a scheme to put every person on the corporate health insurance plans he used to sell," said Andrew Perez, a politics editor for Zeteo, in response to the interview. "Now, he’s saying let’s take away insurance from millions and give them a few bucks for their health care instead. Insane."
In a blog post published last week, Nicole Rapfogel, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan policy think tank, explained why expanded HSAs, backed by the government or otherwise, would do little to nothing to improve access or lower costs for healthcare.
"Expanding HSAs has been a consistent theme, including in the House-passed version of the Republican megabill, though those provisions didn’t pass the Senate," explained Rapfogel. "But these policies are misguided and would do little to preserve access to affordable, comprehensive coverage."
She further explains that HSAs generally are better for wealthier people who have spare income to direct into such accounts, but of little use to poorer Americans who are already struggling to make ends meet each month. According to Rapfogel:
Most people do not have spare cash to set aside in HSAs; an estimated 4 in 10 people are in debt due to medical and dental bills.
People in lower tax brackets also benefit less from HSA tax savings. For example, a married couple making $800,000 saves 37 cents for each dollar contributed to an HSA, more than three times the 12 cents per dollar a married couple making $30,000 would save.
Further, HSAs do not promote efficient use of health care services. Research has shown that HSAs do not reduce health care spending, but rather shield more of that spending from taxes.
Given that understanding of the well-known limitations of HSAs or other avenues of government backstopping of private insurance, the level of bullshitting or straight up ignorance by Oz on Sunday morning, for many, was hard to take.
It's "pretty amazing," said economist Dean Baker on Sunday, "that Dr. Oz doesn't know that people choose their insurance under Obamacare, but no one ever said Dr. Oz knew anything about healthcare."
In an interview with Newsmax earlier this month, Johnson—who has argued that the GOP has reams of policy proposals on the topic—accused Democrats of having no reform solutions to the nation's healthcare crisis other than permanently fighting to save the status quo, including the "subsidizing the insurance companies" which is at the heart of the Affordable Care Act.
Taxpayer subsidies for private insurance giants "is not the solution," Johnson admitted at the time, though his party has refused to offer anything resembling a departure from the for-profit model which experts have demonstrated is the central flaw in the US healthcare system, one that spends more money per capita than any other developed nation but with the worst outcomes.
Meanwhile, as Republicans show in word and deed that they have nothing to offer people concerned about healthcare premiums in the nation's for-profit system, only a relative handful of Democratic Party members have matched renewed focus on the nation's long-simmering healthcare crisis with the popular solution that experts and economists have long favored: a single-payer system now commonly known as Medicare for All.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Senate Democrats, made the demand for Medicare for All a cornerpost of his two presidential campaigns, first in 2016 and then again in 2020. On the heals of those campaigns, which put the demand for a universal healthcare system before voters in a serious way for the first time in several generations, a growing number of lawmakers in Congress embraced the idea even as the party's establishment leadership treated the idea as toxic.
While a 2018 study by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst detailed why it is "easy to pay for something that costs less," people in the United States exposed to the arguments of Medicare for All over the last decade a majority have shown their desire for such a system in poll after poll after poll.
A single-payer system like Medicare for All would nullify the need for private, for-profit insurance plans and the billions of dollars in spending they waste each year in the form of profits, outrageous pay packages for executives, marketing budgets, and administrative inefficiences.
Despite its popularity and the opportunity it presents to show the working class that the Democratic Party is willing to turn its back on corporate interests by putting the healthcare needs of individuals and families first, the party leadership continues to hold back its support.
Lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who served as national co-chair to Sanders' second presidential run, has been arguing in recent weeks, amid the government shutdown fight, that Democrats should be "screaming" their support for universal healthcare "from the rooftops" in order to seize on a moment in which voters from across the political spectrum are more atuned than usual to the pervasive and fundamental failures of the for-profit system.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the US House, on Thursday reiterated her support for universal coverage by saying, "Instead of raising premiums for millions, how about we just get rid of them? Medicare for All!!"
As former Ohio state senator and progressive organizer Nina Turner said on Saturday, "This is a moment to mobilize for Medicare for All."
I went on Fox News to make the case for national health insurance & Medicare for All.
Democrats need to be screaming this from the rooftops. pic.twitter.com/eq9VO0pAxw
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) November 15, 2025
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, another former Sanders surrogate now running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan's US Senate race, has been another outspoken champion of Medicare for All in recent weeks.
"While MAGA slowly suffocates our healthcare system, we’re watching corporate health insurance choose profits—and corporate Democrats capitulating," El-Sayed said last week, expressing frustration over how the shutdown fight came to end. "Who suffers? The rest of us. It’s time for a healthcare system that doesn’t leave our insurance in the hands of big corporations—but guarantees health insurance for all of us."
Following Dr. Oz's remarks on Sunday, El-Sayed rebuked the top cabinet official as emblematic of the entire healthcare charade being perpetrated by the Republican Party under President Donald Trump.
"They think we're dumb," said El-Sayed of Oz's convoluted explanation of direct payments. "They know that no check they send will cover even a month of the healthcare Trump bump we can’t afford—but they think we’re not smart enough to know the difference. Healthcare is becoming unsustainable under Trump. Medicare for All would fix it."
In Maine on Sunday, another Democratic candidate running for the US Senate, Graham Platner, also championed the solution of Medicare for All.
After watching Oz's peformance on CNN, Tyler Evans, creative director who works for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) declared in a social media post: "If we had Medicare for All, you could simply go to the doctor."
“These subsidies have to get bigger and bigger and bigger to keep the ACA affordable,” said US Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. “The fight for healthcare right now can’t end with ACA subsidies. It has to be bigger.”
As the government appears poised to reopen, with Republicans having successfully avoided concessions on their goal of eliminating Affordable Care Act tax credits, President Donald Trump has proposed his own solution to the looming explosion in health insurance costs.
By agreeing to reopen the government without a deal, Democrats have given up their main leverage to force Republicans to extend the credits set to expire at the end of the year. If this happens, over 22 million Americans are expected to see their monthly insurance premiums more than double. As enrollment data for next year shows, Americans are already seeing skyrocketing healthcare costs, not just for ACA recipients but for everyone.
While Republicans successfully strong-armed their opposition into caving by using the shutdown to turn the screws on government workers and food stamp recipients, they still have to weather the political fallout of the coming healthcare apocalypse. A poll released Thursday by KFF found that 74% of Americans—half of whom are self-identified Republicans—want to see the credits extended. Three-quarters also say they'd blame either Trump or Republicans in Congress if they weren't.
On Truth Social Saturday, as a shutdown deal appeared likely, Trump proposed his own idea:
I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare.
Trump is correct that under the current scheme, Americans don't actually receive money directly. But experts warn that while there’s a visceral populist logic to his proposal, the flaws of replacing those annual subsidies with a one-time payment become obvious with the barest of scrutiny, especially when it is paired with a proposal to fully repeal the ACA.
"You have to read between the lines here to imagine what President Trump is proposing," said Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at KFF. "It sounds like it could be a plan for health accounts that could be used for insurance that doesn’t cover preexisting conditions, which could create a death spiral in ACA plans that do."
One of the Senate's most prominent proponents of eliminating the ACA and other parts of the social safety net, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), said he was "writing the bill right now," and clarified that it would indeed involve "HSA-style accounts" for Americans in place of subsidized insurance.
On Sunday, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) noted that this was just a reheating of the "same old, tired proposal of repealing the Affordable Care Act, giving people a benefit in the form of a health savings account, but allowing insurance companies once again to cancel policies and refuse to write policies for people who have preexisting health conditions."
HSAs were a key component of the Republicans' failed 2017 plan to "repeal and replace" the ACA, which many critics pointed out would allow insurers to skyrocket the costs of insurance for those dealing with preexisting conditions.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who sits on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), called Trump's new plan "unsurprisingly nonsensical."
"Is he suggesting eliminating health insurance and giving people a few thousand dollars instead?" Murphy asked. "And then when they get a cancer diagnosis, they just go bankrupt?"
But while many Democrats decried yet another effort to dismantle the ACA, some progressives pointed out that health insurance costs, and healthcare costs more generally, have still exploded under Obamacare, which—despite introducing new guardrails—still leaves profit-driven insurance intact and requires all Americans to purchase it.
"Yes, Mr. President: You’re right. We do have 'the worst healthcare' of any major country," replied Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the HELP committee's ranking member, who has long decried the profiteering of insurance companies. "Despite spending twice as much per capita, we are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all as a human right. The solution: Medicare for All."
He was joined by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who ripped Trump's plan on Fox News.
"Healthcare premiums... they are going to spike about 100% in some cases," Khanna said. "Now, if you take the tax credits and you just give them to the American people, who is the president expecting them to buy the plans from? Is he expecting them to get junk insurance?"
"I agree with him that the system is broken," he continued. "And we should be expanding Medicare to have Medicare for All. But in the meantime, we've got to give people help so that their premiums don't spike."
On social media, Khanna pointed to a 2020 analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found that the US would spend about $650 billion less on healthcare per year in 2030 if it adopted Medicare for All because it would drastically reduce the administrative waste and non-healthcare-related spending inherent to private insurance. It would also allow the government to use its massive leverage as America's primary insurer to negotiate dramatic price reductions for drugs and medical services.
Those arguments have also been made by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a long-time Medicare for All proponent who is running for the open Senate seat in Michigan in 2026. He explained to a crowd that the fact that Republicans "can muck around with subsidies" in the first place is evidence of a broader healthcare crisis that stems from the preeminence of privatized healthcare.
"The very fact that we're watching as these subsidies have to get bigger and bigger and bigger to keep the ACA affordable, the very fact that we're relying on Medicaid to be expanded, that, to me, is the reason why in a moment like this, it's not enough just to protect what we have," he said.
He continued on social media: "The fight for healthcare right now can’t end with ACA subsidies. It has to be bigger. Too many Americans are suffering over medical debt and spiraling costs. It should be nothing short of Medicare for All."