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affordable care act
Trump Administration's New Healthcare Plans Could Slap Families With $31,000 Deductibles
"Nobody wants that product," said one healthcare expert of the Trump administration's proposed plans.
Feb 26, 2026
The Trump administration is proposing new regulations for healthcare plans purchased through Affordable Care Act exchanges that, on the surface, could offer patients lower monthly premiums.
However, the New York Times reported on Thursday that these plans would make up for the lower premiums by charging deductibles as high as $15,000 for individuals and $31,000 for families, meaning that people on these plans would have to pay significant up-front costs should they get sick before getting any benefit from having insurance.
For perspective, the Times noted that these deductibles would be "eight times the average for someone with job-based insurance."
Health experts who spoke with the Times were blunt about these plans' prospects for success.
"Nobody wants that product," Harvard health economist Amitabh Chandra said. "It’s going to be a really cheap product that nobody wants."
Dr. Joseph Betancourt, president of the Commonwealth Fund, told the Times that the plans being mulled by the administration would push greater assumption of risk onto patients and away from insurers.
"There's no doubt that we have an affordability crisis," he said. "As we move forward to shifting more of the burden to patients, there’s a chance to really exacerbate the crisis."
Katherine Hempstead, senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told the Times that the cheaper Trump plans are "normalizing hardship, and... normalizing catastrophe" by creating a form of health insurance that offers even less coverage than the cheapest plans available on the exchanges.
The high-deductible plans are being pushed by Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz, who made headlines earlier this year by saying the goal of the Trump administration's healthcare policy was to have Americans be healthy enough so they could stay at work for at least an extra year before retiring.
"If we can get the average person... to work one more year in their whole lifetime, just stay in your workplace for one more year," Oz said during an interview on Fox Business, "that is worth about $3 trillion to the US GDP."
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely expected to seek the presidency in 2028, pounced on the report about the high-deductible plans.
"[Trump's] economic agenda is simple," Newsom wrote in a social media post, "force hard working families to pay more and give billionaires a tax break."
Johanna Maska, a former aide to President Barack Obama, expressed disbelief that this was Republicans' long-promised replacement plan for the ACA.
"A $31,000 deductible is unacceptable," she wrote. "This is the Republican long awaited plan? This is not healthcare that helps Americans."
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Trump's Health Plan Is Doomed to Fail—We Need Medicare for All
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s concepts of a plan don't even begin to reverse the damage he caused when he made massive cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires.
Jan 17, 2026
President Donald Trump’s new “Great Health Care Plan” is anything but.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s concepts of a plan fail to even begin to reverse the damage he caused when he made massive cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires. Now, Trump and his Republican allies are trying to cover up the gaping wound they have created with a Band-Aid. At the same time, Americans are desperate for relief from Trumpflation, including rapidly rising healthcare costs.
Too many Americans struggle to get the healthcare they need even with insurance. A recent poll found that more than 1-in-3 adults in the US had skipped or postponed needed healthcare in the last 12 months because they couldn’t afford the cost. The situation is even more dire for the uninsured, with 75% of uninsured adults under age 65 reporting going without needed care because of the cost.
Shutdown negotiations and subsequent scattershot health ideas from the White House and Republicans in Congress show they have no real idea what to do when it comes to actually bringing down the cost of healthcare in America. President Trump’s half-baked plan appears doomed to fail and doesn’t even have the support of Republicans in Congress. Plus the only alternate Republican plans for healthcare that currently exist strictly serve corporations and fail to provide relief to patients.
Every other comparably wealthy country has some version of universal healthcare, and none of them would trade their systems for the wasteful and haphazard US system.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has undertaken efforts to further privatize Medicare, including adding Medicare Advantage-style prior authorization to traditional Medicare, risking access to care for seniors by delaying and denying needed care. It also plans to place Medicare enrollees in private health contracts, similar to Medicare Advantage, where the corporations in charge are incentivized to place corporate profits ahead of patient needs.
Americans are angry about our broken healthcare system, and they want a comprehensive solution. One recent survey found that 65% of voters support a Medicare for All-style system. A similar number of voters said that the federal government right now does too little to ensure Americans can afford the healthcare they need. An in-depth study that looked across four years of data found that more than a quarter of adults went without needed care or experienced cost burdens for care they did receive over the four-year period of the study. The high cost of care and limited coverage leaves tens of millions of Americans without adequate coverage, and millions of them end up saddled with medical debt, something unheard of in other comparably wealthy countries. We need to take bold but commonsense action to finally guarantee that everyone in the US can get the healthcare they need.
Providers and hospitals are also desperate for reform. The cost of doing business in our broken healthcare system is causing hospitals to close or shutter crucial services. Providers are facing huge challenges as greedy profiteers, including private equity companies, gobble up their hospitals and medical practices and impose cost-cutting measures in the service of maximizing profits.
Fortunately, Medicare for All would address all of these issues and finally put the health of Americans ahead of corporate profits. Medicare for All would guarantee that everyone in the US can get the care they need when they need it, without financial barriers or hoops to jump through, and would be cheaper than our current system while providing coverage that is better than any commercial health insurance plan. It would do this by taking Medicare—one of the most popular parts of our healthcare system—improving it by expanding available services, ending out-of-pocket costs, and expanding it to everyone in the country.
Corporations and certain members of Congress purposefully make such a commonsense system sound like an impossible leap from America’s current broken system in order to stifle American dissatisfaction with our healthcare and keep shareholders happy. But every other comparably wealthy country has some version of universal healthcare, and none of them would trade their systems for the wasteful and haphazard US system.
We continue to see more members of Congress signing on to support Medicare for All in both the House and the Senate, and more municipalities supporting resolutions in favor of Congress passing Medicare for All. The time has come to unite around Medicare for All and build the movement that can finally make it a reality.
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Critics Say Trump 'Joke Healthcare Plan' Nothing But a 'Con' of the American People
“In the longer term, we must finally pass Medicare for All, an actually great healthcare plan," said one campaigner.
Jan 15, 2026
US President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a "Great Healthcare Plan" that critics panned for being "short on details," arguing that—contrary to White House claims—the scheme will lead to higher consumer costs and less care.
Trump called on Congress to pass his proposal, which he said will "lower drug prices, lower insurance premiums, hold big insurance companies accountable, and maximize price transparency."
However, the advocacy group Protect Our Care called the proposal a "joke healthcare plan" and a "sad attempt to continue gaslighting the American people."
"Since taking office, President Trump and his cronies in Congress have taken a hammer to American healthcare to enrich billionaires and big corporations," the group said. "First, they slashed $1 trillion dollars from Medicaid, and then they doubled, tripled, and quadrupled health premiums for nearly 22 million Americans already struggling to get by in Trump’s unaffordable America."
"Now that it is clear that busting working families’ budgets is bad policy and bad politics, Trump is scrambling for a lifeline," Protect Our Care added. "The solution to ending the Trump-GOP premium disaster isn’t rocket science. It is the three-year, clean extension of the Affordable Care Act tax credits that the House passed. This commonsense solution that Trump callously threatened to veto is now sitting on Senate Republican Leader John Thune’s (SD) desk."
Trump’s new health care plan doesn’t help people facing skyrocketing ACA premiums.No fix for affordability. No solution for families struggling to stay covered.Just another empty framework while costs climb.
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— Protect Our Care (@protectourcare.org) January 15, 2026 at 12:57 PM
The Senate—which last month voted down a similar three-year-extension to what House lawmakers passed—has yet to schedule a vote on the extension. An attempt to advance the bill through a unanimous consent agreement was blocked by Republicans on Wednesday.
Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said in a statement Thursday that “Trump’s half-baked healthcare ‘plan’ is a con that does nothing to help Americans facing soaring costs and would raise healthcare expenses while cutting coverage."
"That’s no surprise from a president who is taking healthcare away from 15 million Americans to pay for tax breaks for billionaires," he added. "If the White House is serious about lowering healthcare costs right now, they should support legislation to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits that already passed the House with bipartisan support. The American people deserve real solutions, not gimmicks.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that a three-year extension of the enhanced ACA premium tax credits would increase the number of Americans with health insurance by millions, including approximately 3 million in 2027 and 4 million in 2028.
Eagan Kemp, healthcare policy advocate at the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday that “Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan is impressive only in the fact that it isn’t great, wouldn’t substantively improve healthcare, and isn’t even detailed enough to be considered a plan."
“Trump and his cronies have had more than a decade to come up with something beyond ‘concepts of a plan’ but have failed time and time again," Kemp continued. "The American people are suffering under a broken healthcare system that has been made worse by Trump and his MAGA allies."
“By passing tax cuts for billionaires and paying for them through healthcare cuts for tens of millions of people, Trump and Republicans showed their disdain for everyday Americans. In the short run, the Senate must follow the lead of the House and pass a clean three-year extension of the ACA subsidies," he said.
“In the longer term," Kemp added, "we must finally pass Medicare for All, an actually great healthcare plan, to finally guarantee everyone in the US can get the care they need throughout their lives without financial barriers."
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