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health insurance
Trump Admin Argues Even Terminally Ill Patients Shouldn't Be Exempt From Medicaid Work Requirements
Under a new policy the administration is defending in court, low-income people with cancer, HIV, Parkinson's, and other life-threatening illnesses must prove they're too sick to work or risk losing their health insurance.
Jul 30, 2026
A federal judge on Thursday denied a request by more than two dozen Democratic states to halt a Trump administration policy announced last month that would require Medicaid recipients with terminal diseases to prove they are too sick to work in order to be exempt from new work requirements that go into effect this coming January.
While introducing over $1 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, last year's massive GOP tax and budget bill also imposed new 80-hour-per-month work requirements that states must implement for Medicaid expansion recipients, who receive government-subsidized insurance coverage at or below 138% of the poverty line.
The law specified that those who are “medically frail or otherwise have special medical needs” are excluded from the work requirement, and specifically listed people with a “serious or complex medical condition.” But it remained unclear what exact conditions met these criteria.
Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced a new rule stating that even if a person receives a terminal diagnosis for a disease like cancer, HIV/AIDS, or Parkinson's, that is still not enough for them to be exempt from the work requirements.
Beginning on January 1, 2028, it says they must also demonstrate to states that their condition “significantly impairs” their ability to meet the work requirement.
Democratic attorneys general in 25 states and the District of Columbia filed a preliminary injunction over the rule late last month, arguing that CMS had rewritten the law to introduce a vague and needlessly restrictive new hurdle that vulnerable people will face in obtaining desperately needed care.
“This is one of those cases where it’s really hard to overstate how dire the consequences could be,” North Carolina’s Democratic attorney general, Jeff Jackson, told Politico. “You’re going to have 50 states doing 50 different things, and we’re all going to have to create a whole new bureaucracy... You are talking about a lot more paperwork, more evaluations, more doctor visits, and a lot more work for doctors themselves.”
The Democratic AGs argued that implementation of the work requirements should be paused because they lacked the staff or capacity to meet the timeline set by CMS, which requires states to communicate to enrollees how they'll be affected by the changes by the end of August.
US District Judge Richard Stearns on Thursday denied their initial request to immediately halt the implementation of the requirements while the lawsuit proceeds, but also did not rule on the lawsuit's merits, which are scheduled to be decided before the requirements go into effect on January 1.
Several medical associations, including the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have come out against the rule, arguing that it would have dire consequences for people who suffer from severe illness.
"One of the most significant factors in whether someone survives a cancer diagnosis is whether they have health insurance coverage," Lisa Lacasse, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, explained in June.
"The new restrictions link the definition of medical frailty to a person’s ability to work," she continued. "This would mean cancer patients and survivors who are suffering from debilitating side effects of the disease or treatment would have to officially prove they can’t work, in a process that is likely to be difficult and take a long time."
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that over the coming decade, changes to healthcare policy introduced by Republicans would increase the number of uninsured Americans by about 11.8 million.
Around 5.7 million of them are projected to be Medicaid recipients who either do not meet the 80-hour work requirement or are otherwise eligible but tripped up by one of the newly imposed paperwork hurdles.
Taya Graham and Stephen Janis argued earlier this week in a piece for The Real News Network that eligible people losing coverage is not an unfortunate side effect of the law, but a goal of the Republicans who passed it, who sought a way to thin the ranks of those who qualify for Medicaid without having to take the politically unpopular step of actually clawing back benefits.
They wrote that what has happened to recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) illustrates how burdensome these new requirements may become.
As The New York Times reported earlier this month, in Arizona, 440,000 people have already been dropped from SNAP after it enacted a formidable regime of paperwork for low-income recipients to prove eligibility, including requiring some people with panhandling income to obtain documentation from donors who drop them a buck on the street.
"If this is what people receiving SNAP benefits have been subjected to," Graham and Janis wrote, "imagine what’s going to happen to people who will need to navigate the new [Medicaid] requirements while struggling with a debilitating or terminal illness."
Medical issues are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. According to one study, over 4 in 10 cancer patients over 50 had depleted all their assets within two years of diagnosis.
Melanie D’Arrigo, a campaigner for single-payer healthcare in New York, said that President Donald Trump "cut cancer research, cut healthcare,” and with new Medicaid restrictions, “wants to make sure Americans continue to work as they go broke battling cancer.”
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Hospitals See Massive Surge in Uninsured Patients After GOP's Healthcare Cuts
"We’re really crushing people who are desperately trying to pay their bills," said a chief executive at a nonprofit hospital group.
Jul 30, 2026
Months after congressional Republicans refused to extend enhanced subsidies for Americans who receive their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, hospitals across the US are seeing a surge in uninsured patients seeking emergency medical care.
According to a Thursday report in The New York Times, executives at large hospital systems have been raising alarms over "the unexpectedly sharp rise in uninsured patients and the costs associated with treating them."
With many uninsured patients unable to pay their hospital bills, the Times noted, hospitals are seeing "lost revenues amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars across the country's vast health systems."
The Times linked this surge in uninsured patients directly to the Republican-controlled Congress allowing more generous subsidies for plans purchased through the ACA to lapse at the end of 2025. Enrollment in the program has fallen by about 3 million people since last year.
"What that tells me is that there are patients who are completely unable to pay," Laura Kaiser, chief executive of Catholic nonprofit hospital group SSM Health, told the Times. "We’re really crushing people who are desperately trying to pay their bills."
Executives at Universal Health Services (UHS), a for-profit hospital operator, said during an earnings call on Tuesday that the losses they expect to incur from treating uninsured patients have been significantly higher than their initial projects.
As reported by Healthcare Dive on Wednesday, UHS had initially projected that some patients who dropped their coverage provided by the ACA would find another way to get health insurance.
However, UHS CFO Steve Filton told investors that "it felt like virtually everyone who lost their exchange coverage became an uninsured patient."
UHS is hardly alone in suffering losses due to lapsed ACA subsidies, as Axios reported on Tuesday that HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit hospital chain in the US, is projecting a $400 million hit to revenue that is tied partially to "an influx of uninsured patients."
HCA CEO Sam Hazen said the increase in uninsured patients was a direct consequence of the GOP's refusal to extend the ACA subsidies.
"The effects, as expected, were that many people became uninsured and still needed emergency care from hospitals," Hazen said. "As we look at the first half of the year, our expectations proved accurate, although the impact was greater than our estimates."
An increase in uninsured patients is bad both for hospitals' finances and patients themselves.
As KFF explained in a June report, people without insurance are more likely to avoid seeking medical treatment until their situation becomes too dire to ignore.
"People without health coverage are more likely to be hospitalized for avoidable health problems," KFF wrote, "and to experience declines in their overall health as a consequence of having undiagnosed conditions and a lower likelihood of receiving preventive and chronic disease management care. When they are hospitalized, uninsured people receive fewer diagnostic and therapeutic services and also have higher mortality rates than those with insurance."
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How to Celebrate Medicare's 61st Birthday? Expand It to Everyone
Medicare has become living proof that public, universal health insurance is superior to private insurance in every way.
Jul 30, 2026
Sixty one years ago, July 30, 1965, Congress enacted Medicare to provide health insurance for people ages 65 and older and the disabled regardless of income or medical history. At the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Harry S. Truman and his wife, former First Lady Bess Truman, became the first recipients of the new Medicare health insurance program. President Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress enacted Medicare under Title XVIII of the Social Security Act.
Medicare was a momentous act because it provided new health insurance for people ages 65 and older and the disabled regardless of income or medical history. In the years since, Medicare has become living proof that public, universal health insurance is superior to private insurance in every way. Medicare is more efficient than private health insurance and is administered at a cost of 3-4%, as opposed to private, for-profit health insurance, which has administrative costs above 15%.
Following the successful 1965 grassroots campaign to enact Medicare, many also believed that the dream of a full national, single-payer health insurance system that included all age groups, “Medicare for All,” was right around the corner. Unfortunately decades later, Medicare still has not been expanded. Most of the changes have been contractions with higher out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and repeated attempts at privatization by Big Pharma, Big health insurance industry companies-oligarchs-profiteers, and their champions in the White House and Congress.
Big insurance and Big Pharma continue opposing legislation for the new, improved Medicare for All because these resistant, self-serving industries have the most to lose if their huge profits are redirected to direct patient care for all. Individual and corporate predators regard democracy, government, and community as obstacles to their greed and avarice, always placing profits over individual patients, families, and public health. It’s no wonder so many beholden members of Congress want to protect the interests of Big Insurance and Big Pharma, industries that spent $371 million on lobbying in 2017 alone.
The Big Health Insurance-Big Pharma-Congressional Profiteering Complex
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, framed by former Trump administration staffers and secretly endorsed by President Donald Trump himself, proposes changes in Medicare benefits that could destroy Medicare as we know it. Instead, we must fight back and expand Medicare. Although health insurance affordability for the majority of US citizens still remains elusive, President Trump’s health insurance plan still wants to shift many more dollars into private, Wall Street insurance industry hands. The takeover of public health insurance, as with Medicare Advantage plans and others, by private Wall Street entities continues apace as Republicans and Trump propose to increase taxes and give it to the private profit insurance industry—the basic source of our profound administrative waste, along with the costly administrative burdens they place on the delivery system that requires large profits. Profiteering continues unabated as private insurance sells us services we don’t need or want, such as deductibles and other cost sharing and maintenance of narrow networks, requiring prior authorization with increased administrative costs, excessive ongoing paperwork, and documentation requirements, all while avoiding paying for surprise bills and other denied benefits.
No greater disconnect exists between the public good and private interests than in the voracious US system of for-profit Big Insurance and Big Pharma.
Dealing with Covid-19 could have been more lifesaving if Medicare for All had been in place. A New York Times editorial, "Health Care for Some is a Recipe for Disaster," stresses the importance of covering everyone. Even before Covid-19 was known to humans, Northeastern University professor of public health, Wendy Parmet, presciently warned that the push to exclude immigrants from access to healthcare services would be both dangerous and quixotic. “None of us can be self-sufficient in the face of a widespread epidemic,” she wrote in 2018. “That is just as true for noncitizen immigrants as everyone.” In any pandemic, self-sufficiency can be self-deluding; everyone’s health, citizens, immigrants, etc. alike is only as good as our most vulnerable neighbor’s.
Truly a recipe for disaster, vested interests reject the science of public health epidemiology by asserting that only a slow, incremental approach to health insurance reform is possible or acceptable. So, what are we willing to settle for, should we just settle for what we can get? Lower the expectations, turn down the public heat, and keep waiting?. Gradualism, baby steps, extending health insurance coverage to some, but not all, is the mantra of the day; "Medicare for Some," but not "Medicare for All," is fawned over by politicians, profiteers, and advocacy groups alike while reducing communities resources to deal with dangerous epidemics and other health problems.
Virtually all the risky gradual reforms being touted would reinforce a dysfunctional health insurance system with as many standards of insurance as there are dollars to purchase them. It would further lock us into an obsolete private insurance-based model that holds everyone's health hostage to profiteering HMOs and unaccountable big insurance companies for years to come. For these proponents of political expediency, the question remains: Who will be left behind while we wait? Every year many unnecessary deaths are linked to lack of health insurance coverage. Pandemics can quickly increase these numbers.
Big Insurance and Big Pharma dominate our government, and public health takes a back seat to the need for private profit. Many government leaders from both political parties share the same "profits over public health" ideology, even though the Covid-19 pandemic clearly showed how our economic system failed to serve our citizens by allowing these groups to privatize, sabotage, fragment, and cripple our health, public health, and other social services. Many of the changes in traditional Medicare have been contractions with higher out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and repeated attempts at privatization by Big Pharma, and Big Health insurance. No greater disconnect exists between the public good and private interests than in the voracious US system of for-profit Big Insurance and Big Pharma and their inherent tendency to invent new needs, disregard all boundaries, and turn everything into an object for sale and big profit.
Medicare for All 2026 Meets Eight High Standards
Medicare for All Act (M4A)-2026 is best solution because it meets eight basic standards:
- Health insurance coverage should be stable and permanent throughout life. M4A-2026 would be a single program—permanent throughout life.
- Employer-sponsored insurance can create problems such as job lock, which many conservatives and progressives believe should be terminated. M4A-2026 would end employer-sponsored insurance, and, for most, M4A-2026 would be better.
- Medicaid carries the stigma of being a welfare program which results in legislative underfunding and neglect. M4A-2026 would fully terminate the Medicaid program and move everyone into a universal, comprehensive, and equitable program.
- We need a program that is affordable for each individual and for society as a whole. M4A-2026 would achieve all goals of financing reform without significantly increasing spending.
- Patients should have free choice of their professionals and healthcare institutions. M4A-2026 allows choices within the entire healthcare system.
- The privatization of public programs such as Medicare through Medicare Advantage and Medicaid through private managed care programs have proven to provide poor value for the taxpayer (obscured by cherry-picking and lemon dropping) and should be eliminated. M4A-2026 would eliminate them.
- Fragmentation results in dysfunctional financing of healthcare; M4A-2026 would bring an end to it.
- M4A-2026 is specifically designed to greatly reduce fragmentation and its associated costs; health insurance industry profiteering is ended.
Summary
To continue our 61 years of progress, it’s time to upgrade Medicare by establishing a 21st century improved “Medicare for All” health insurance system that covers all age groups, cradle to grave. Newborns will leave the hospital with their new Medicare card, and drop it off years later at life’s end. Two comprehensive M4A bills now filed in Congress, H.R. 3069 and S.1506, propose to insure or cover all medically necessary services. Patients have their choice of physicians, mental health professionals, other healthcare professionals, hospitals, and clinics.
M4A insured health services include:- Primary care
- Medically approved diet and nutrition services
- Inpatient care
- Outpatient care
- Emergency care
- Prescription drugs
- Long-term care and palliative care
- Mental health services
- Dentistry
- Eye care
- Substance abuse treatment
Because our government, instead of private profit health insurance companies, serves us as the health insurance financing authority, co-pays and deductibles paid at health professionals' offices are ended because payment for health insurance is fully prepaid directly into Medicare, much like Social Security, and covered at first dollar amounts. This means the obsolete 80%-20% payment split between private health insurance companies and Medicare is eliminated, with Medicare for All covering 100%.
The major reason private health insurers are more expensive than government health programs in the US is due to profiteering and administrative costs. Those extra taxpayer funds going to private insurers include costs such as advertising and marketing of their plans, costs of contracting for restrictive provider networks, administering prior authorization requirements, complex systems of processing claims including denial of benefits, simple administrative costs of operating large corporate entities, and distributing generous profits to their executives and passive high profiteering by Wall Street investors.
The Medicare for All Act-2026, now filed in Congress, would much better fill our healthcare financing needs without wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on superfluous administrative costs and end immense profiteering by private insurers and Big Pharma. The USA is a country where health insurance for medical and mental healthcare is a function of socioeconomic status. Everyone knows that this inhumane system should have been corrected long ago.
Please tell your legislators that it’s time to end inadequate and dangerous health insurance programs. Insist on real health insurance reform essential for individuals and families. American history is filled with examples of fundamental, democratic change brought about by successful mass action and public pressure against the counseling of the go-slow, vested-interest crowd. No more waiting! Ask your legislators to fully support Medicare For All 2026 now: H.R. 3069 and S. 1506
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Our Healthcare System Is Failing; Medicare for All Is the Solution
When everybody has guaranteed access to high-quality care without financial barriers, physicians can focus solely on their patients’ needs and patients can trust that our recommendations are based on science.
Jul 23, 2026
The following remarks were delivered as testimony to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Medicare for All Shadow Hearing on July 22, 2026.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak about our urgent need for Medicare for All. My name is Dr. Diljeet Singh, and as a practicing gynecologic oncologist, I do not exaggerate when I say our healthcare system is in dire straits. Every day in my clinic, I see patients struggling with the cost of healthcare: a woman on chemotherapy who cannot afford her anti-nausea prescription, or a patient forced to choose between an MRI copay and groceries for her family. If you walked through my clinic, you would know that this is no time to be tinkering with unproven reforms or complex regulations. It is long past time for Medicare for All.
I care for a part-time elementary school teacher whose health plan did not cover routine preventive care. Instead of getting regular Pap smears over the years, she arrived in my office with advanced cervical cancer. She underwent radical surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation that fundamentally changed her body and her life—and she still has no guarantee of a cure.
Or consider another patient of mine who works two part-time jobs, with no health insurance. She ignored severe abdominal pain until it doubled her over. In the emergency room, she was told she had a potentially cancerous mass. She came to me for care, and thankfully, it turned out to be a non-cancerous ovarian cyst, cured by surgery. Yet, even in this best-case medical scenario, she still owes thousands of dollars. A treatable, curable medical problem absorbed her children’s college savings and her retirement money.
When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed.
I am speaking to you today as president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an organization of more than 25,000 health professionals nationwide. We are working to achieve universal single-payer healthcare—free from corporate middlemen, copays, deductibles, prior authorization, and the risk of medical debt. Similar countries around the world provide care to all while spending only half of what we spend—yet we die younger, face higher maternal mortality, and lose more newborns. We already spend enough money, but at least 35 cents of every healthcare dollar is wasted on insurance administration and corporate profit instead of patient care.
The root cause of this failure is the corporate takeover of healthcare, where financial interests take precedence over the sacred oath we swore as physicians—to prioritize our patients’ health and make evidence-based, patient-centered decisions free from third-party interference.
At PNHP, we conducted a two-year research project speaking with doctors about working in a profit-driven system where financial goals dictate clinical care. We found that doctors, like nurses, suffer from profound “moral injury”—the acute psychological harm caused by systemic barriers that prevent us from providing compassionate, evidence-based care. When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed, driving clinicians out of medicine in increasing numbers.
Reversing this crisis requires recentering healthcare on patients and aligning with its true mission. The most commonsense solution is single-payer Medicare for All. When everybody has guaranteed access to high-quality care without financial barriers, physicians can focus solely on their patients’ needs and patients can trust that our recommendations are based on science and their healthcare needs—not corporate bottom lines.
Doctors, nurses, and patients understand that we need Medicare for All. Now we need Congress to understand the same thing—and to act with all of the urgency that this moment requires.
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True Universal Healthcare Means Medicare For All, Not a 'Public Option'
As politicians debate “universal healthcare,” we need those two words to be much more than a campaign slogan or an empty promise. Healthcare must be a true human right, easily exercised by every single person in America.
Jul 21, 2026
As a Maryland pediatrician, I serve patients and communities who struggle at the broken edges of the American healthcare “system.” My patients are from families working three or four jobs with no benefits, just barely getting by. With more grace than I could ever summon, these families diligently follow the protocols to determine their children’s “eligibility” for healthcare. The American healthcare system scrutinizes a family’s pay stubs, bank statements, and employment status—a process called means testing—to determine if they are eligible for Medicaid or a pittance of help to purchase a private insurance plan. It is not enough to be a human being. Our healthcare system must determine where you are on the spectrum of worthy to unworthy before you can get any medical care.
My pediatric patients whose parents get health insurance through their employment are not doing much better. An inhaler that helps an asthmatic breathe easier is covered by the insurance corporation one year, but not the next. Similarly, a specialist who has masterfully managed a patient’s seizures for several years is suddenly “out of network.” Never mind that the patient’s parents are paying premiums from every single paycheck to that multibillion-dollar insurance corporation. Playing by the corporate greed machine’s rules does not protect patients from arbitrary decisions that are supposedly good for business.
Over the course of my 20 years working in healthcare, I have seen more and more patients with supposedly good insurance avoid necessary medical care because the out-of-pocket costs keep increasing. In the richest country in the world, families are stuck between the false choices of paying for rent, groceries, utilities, or healthcare. Choosing healthcare can cost anywhere from feeding your family to putting a roof over their head.
All of us are trapped in this infuriating maze of puzzles and peril. Looking at this cruel mess of a system, we have politicians saying a “public option” is enough to fix things. There are think tanks describing a system of “universal healthcare” where the expensive (and yet, worthless) plans from private insurance corporations, the 50 shades of Medicaid, and a public option somehow achieve a magical harmony. To make things even more complicated, it is unclear what exactly a public option could look like. It could mean patients have the option of buying into Medicare or Medicaid. Or it could mean a separate public insurance plan at the federal level, possibly available to everyone or possibly just the ones deemed needy enough.
Medicare For All is true universal healthcare, where patients and families have peace of mind whenever and wherever they need medical help.
We need to be clear about what “universal healthcare” ought to mean. Everybody getting expensive-but-worthless plans from insurance corporations is universal financial stress, not universal healthcare. Similarly, adding any kind of “public option” fragment to a ridiculously fragmented system is universal confusion, not universal healthcare.
Insurance corporations have a long track record of deploying lobbyists and misinformation to undermine provisions of the Affordable Care Act. It is foolish to think these greed machines will become good-faith partners in our healthcare, competing fair and square with any kind of public option. Corporate lobbyists will see to it that any public option uses complicated means testing to determine which members of the public are worthy or unworthy of the care. These corporations will also manipulate their own plans to shut out patients who need healthcare the most, leaving them to a public option struggling to pay doctors and hospitals. Insurance greed machines do not want competition, and will undermine a public option any way they can.
Rather than tinker with a corporate-driven healthcare system determined to put profits before patients, let’s build universal healthcare through Medicare For All. Because healthcare is a human right, Medicare For All guarantees every single person living in America is eligible. We can save billions of dollars when we stop scrutinizing who is worthy or unworthy. Medicare For All provides the kind of coverage that stays with people from cradle to grave. It is mobile coverage, staying with patients from state to state, or job to job. Hospitals and clinics will remain open and properly staffed because Medicare For All puts patients first, not profits. Because all 342 million of us are covered, Medicare For All will have powerful leverage to negotiate with Big Pharma about the cost of prescriptions. Medicare For All is true universal healthcare, where patients and families have peace of mind whenever and wherever they need medical help.
We have tolerated an intolerable healthcare system for far too long. In the coming years, as politicians debate “universal healthcare,” we need those two words to be much more than a campaign slogan or an empty promise. Healthcare must be a true human right, easily exercised by every single person in America. We can and we will make that right a reality with Medicare For All.
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Millions of Americans Joining the Ranks of the Uninsured Thanks to Trump-GOP Cuts in 2025
New data released by KFF underscores how "universal, seamless coverage throughout the life course remains an urgent prerogative for the nation," said one physician and advocate.
Mar 20, 2026
About 24.3 million Americans were enrolled in healthcare plans within the Affordable Care Act marketplace last year, but a survey released Thursday by KFF found that about 1 in 10 of those people had no choice but to make a difficult and risky calculation at the end of 2025 when ACA subsidies expired due to Republicans' refusal to support an extension.
According to the research, 9% of people enrolled in plans under the marketplace last year are now uninsured, having dropped their coverage—and costs were a deciding factor for the vast majority of those who left the marketplace.
The expiration of the enhanced tax credits sent premiums skyrocketing by an average of 114%, according to KFF.
The decision was unavoidable for one 54-year-old man in Texas, who told KFF simply, "Without the subsidy, I cannot afford the premium payments.”
A 56-year-old woman in Illinois said her income was too high last year to qualify for subsidies, but the increase in cost this year was "so high even for those without subsidies."
"I simply cannot afford to pay $1,200 a month for insurance," she said. "It used to be high premiums meant low deductibles and copays, but not anymore. This is ridiculous. $1,200 for a healthy person, and an $8,000 deductible. Really?”
A Florida resident named Kelly Rose told The Wall Street Journal that the $1,700 monthly premium she was quoted for an ACA plan would have been more than her mortgage. She missed the enrollment window for health coverage through her job at a bank—assuming her ACA plan would cost less—and is now uninsured and relying on a Canadian pharmacy to get her asthma medication, which would cost $800 per month without insurance in the US.
Cynthia Cox, a senior vice president at KFF, told the Journal that the survey results were “about on target” what the health policy research group had expected last year when the subsidy expiration was looming and Democrats were demanding that the GOP vote with them to extend the tax credits.
“Not only is there significant coverage loss, but there could be more to come,” Cox said.
An estimated 25 million Americans are uninsured, said Harvard Medical School professor and former Physicians for a National Health Plan president Adam Gaffney—a fact he called "abhorrent" as he suggested the new data makes the latest case for "universal, seamless coverage throughout the life course," or an expansion of the Medicare program to the entire US population.
That proposal, which has been introduced in Congress numerous times by lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), would put the US in line with the healthcare systems of other wealthy nations, improve healthcare outcomes, and save an estimated $650 billion per year.
A poll released late last year by Data for Progress found that 65% of likely US voters supported "creating a national health insurance program, sometimes called ‘Medicare for All,’ that would cover all Americans and replace most private health insurance plans."
The fact that millions of Americans have chosen to opt out of the country's for-profit health insurance system—putting their health and finances at risk—is representative of "a profound hollowing-out and weakening of America," said writer and markets researcher Ben Hunt.
The economic justice campaign Unrig Our Economy emphasized that Republicans' cuts to healthcare last year—via the expiration of the subsidies and slashes to Medicaid—put an estimated 15 million Americans at risk of losing health coverage.
“Republicans knew that healthcare tax credits were critical to helping millions of Americans afford their health insurance, but they chose to get rid of them to fund more tax breaks for their billionaire buddies,” said Unrig Our Economy campaign director Leor Tal. “Costs are higher, millions are without insurance, and working Americans are having to make sacrifices just to afford basic healthcare—and they know that Republicans are to blame. It’s time Republicans finally started listening to their constituents and fixing the healthcare crisis they created.”
KFF's polling also found that among people who still have health insurance under the ACA, higher premiums and deductibles have left a majority concerned that they wouldn't be able to afford emergency care even with their coverage. Nearly half of respondents said they were worried that even routine medical care will be unaffordable this year with their ACA plans.
Due to Republican attacks, the cost of coverage offered by the program is now forcing 55% of people using the ACA to cut back on spending money on food, household items, and clothing in order to afford it. Forty-three percent said they are trying to find another job or extra income to afford healthcare payments, and nearly a quarter said they are skipping or delaying payments on other bills to afford their health coverage.
More than half of people polled by KFF said they blame Republicans in Congress for their rising healthcare costs.
"Americans are blaming them because it’s true," said Unrig Our Economy. "Congressional Republicans’ massive cuts to health care have put a projected 15 million Americans at risk of losing health insurance and left millions more struggling to keep up with rising costs. Republicans made these cuts all so they could give more tax breaks to billionaires and corporations."
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Insurance CEO Testimony ‘Made Case for Medicare for All Better Than Almost Anyone'
"Under Medicare for All, these insurance vultures who profit from the suffering of everyday Americans would all be out of a job—bringing down costs across the health system—which should be reason enough to support it," said one advocate.
Jan 23, 2026
If you want a compelling case for Medicare for All, just listen to the ultra-rich CEOs of the insurance companies profiting off the United States' disastrous for-profit status quo.
That was Public Citizen healthcare policy advocate Eagan Kemp's takeaway from congressional testimony delivered Thursday by the top executives of UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Aetna owner CVS Health, Elevance, and Ascendiun, some of the largest beneficiaries of a system under which millions of Americans face massive costs, care denials, and labyrinthine administrative hurdles.
"In both of today’s House hearings, health insurance executives’ devil-may-care attitude towards Americans’ health made the case for Medicare for All better than almost anyone I have ever seen," Kemp said in a statement following the hearings held by the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee's healthcare panel.
"Rarely has there been a more feckless, uncaring, and unsympathetic group of paper pushers," said Kemp. "Under Medicare for All, these insurance vultures who profit from the suffering of everyday Americans would all be out of a job—bringing down costs across the health system—which should be reason enough to support it. We need Medicare for All to finally put us on par with every other comparably wealthy country by guaranteeing everyone in the U.S. can get the health care they need, throughout their lives."
The executives faced angry grilling from both Democrats and Republicans during Thursday's hearings, which came as health insurance premiums are skyrocketing due to the GOP's refusal to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies that lapsed at the end of 2025.
"Do you understand why the American people are not a fan of UnitedHealthcare and big healthcare companies?" Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.) asked UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley, telling the story of a 3-year-old girl whose family was forced to take on more than $1 million in medical debt and declare bankruptcy because the insurance giant would not cover doctors' recommended treatment for a tumor in her bladder.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC), who recently underwent brain surgery, told the insurance executives that he faced eight care denials for necessary medication.
"You have put profits above patients, and you have put profits above those who care for patients," said Murphy, a physician. "If it were up to me, I would throw out all for-profit systems in this country and turn everybody into nonprofit. It has gotten that bad."
"If I had my way, I'd turn all of you guys into dust," he added. "We'd start back from scratch."
The @WaysandMeansGOP held a hearing on the impact of rising health care costs on patients and families.
We have to have serious reform of health insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, and their subsidiaries to reduce the cost of healthcare. pic.twitter.com/pQEE4WgQtk
— Congressman Greg Murphy, M.D. (@RepGregMurphy) January 22, 2026
The insurance executives attempted to shift the blame for high costs and other systemic issues onto hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies, while offering Band-Aid solutions.
UnitedHealth Group's CEO pledged during his testimony to return its 2026 Affordable Care Act profits to consumers in the form of rebates.
"If you’re feeling a little misty-eyed about this sudden burst of corporate altruism, let me save you the trouble. This isn’t a moral awakening. It’s a PR maneuver and narrative control being implemented in real-time," said Wendell Potter, a former health insurance executive who now supports Medicare for All, which would virtually eliminate private insurance and provide comprehensive health coverage for everyone in the US for free at the point of service, for a lower overall cost than the for-profit status quo.
"UnitedHealth’s pledge is just a long, desperate PR pass into the end zone, praying lawmakers and reporters will focus on the gesture instead of the business model that allows them to gobble up those dollars in the first place," Potter added. "This isn’t a gift. It’s a distraction."
Kemp of Public Citizen said Thursday that “in the short term, the Senate must pass a clean three-year extension of the enhanced ACA premium tax credits to address runaway premium increases for millions of Americans."
"In the long run," he added, "we must continue building the movement that will pass Medicare for All and make it the law of the land."
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It's Obvious the US Healthcare System Isn't Working, So Why Not Try Medicare for All?
In a moment when the boundaries of what is “reasonable” or “possible” have been completely blown open, universal healthcare no longer seems so unrealistic.
Dec 18, 2025
Between the (likely) expiration of the Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, and the decade-long efforts to undermine and dismantle the ACA, the casualties and costs of our current healthcare system continue to grow as Americans continue to wait for a better option. Nearly 45,000 Americans aged 17-65 die each year due to lack of insurance, a number that could rise to over 51,000 preventable deaths in the coming years.
Yet, the Senate has failed to pass either healthcare plan proposed to keep health insurance premiums from skyrocketing in the New Year and the Medicare for All bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and US Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) in April 2025 has not advanced in Congress. Ideas like Medicare for All or universal healthcare often make eyes roll. “That’s unrealistic,” we’re told.
But is it? Universal healthcare is, after all, the reality for most other high-income countries. And yes, it might be disruptive, but Americans have lived through unprecedented changes and significant events in the past five years: the Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6 insurrection, and the rapid development of generative AI. Throughout history, major healthcare reforms have been born from disruption; Medicare is rooted in the civil rights movement, and the ACA passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Now, as the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, our foundational rights and institutions are being tested in ways that once would have been unthinkable. In a moment when the boundaries of what is “reasonable” or “possible” have been completely blown open, universal healthcare no longer seems so unrealistic.
Do we accept being the only high-income country where getting sick can cost you your home, your job, or your life?
We certainly can’t continue as we’ve been going. As a nurse scientist and postdoctoral fellow, I have a front-row seat to the healthcare crises we are facing: unaffordable medical bills, growing healthcare costs, long waits for specialty and even primary care appointments, and the growing burden of chronic illness and mental health crises. Employers are now shifting employees into high-deductible plans with high out-of-pocket costs. People are effectively locked into jobs they cannot leave because losing coverage, even temporarily, can be a significant financial risk—especially for those covering spouses and children.
We have extensive evidence, both internationally and within the US, showing what strategies produce better results. Any meaningful reform should include:
- Universal population coverage: Federal requirements must guarantee that every person living in the US has insurance that covers necessary healthcare services, including primary care, specialty care, mental health, reproductive health, preventive care, and hospitalizations.
- Care that is free or affordable: A largely single-payer financing model like Canada, Australia, and most high-income countries (as proposed in the “Medicare For All” bill) or a hybrid public-private system, where private insurance is still available but federally regulated to ensure cost containment, limit out-of-pocket costs, and eliminate catastrophic medical expenses, protecting families from significant medical debt.
- A focus on prevention and primary care: Meaningful investment in preventive services, primary care, and care coordination to reduce costs, prevent unnecessary emergency room visits and hospitalizations, and improve long-term health.
But people remain skeptical that we can achieve these goals in the US—largely because of public opinion and political will, both of which are significantly influenced by private health corporations, including insurance companies, large hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, and other obscure middlemen that profit from the status quo.
For decades these corporations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and advertising to the public to protect their revenue and discourage solutions that most of us agree with and would benefit from. President Donald Trump himself criticized health insurers as “money-sucking,” calling them “BIG BAD insurance companies.” If policymakers on both sides of the aisle agree that corporate interests are getting in the way of healthcare reform, why do we continue to defer to them?
Opponents of single-payer, universal healthcare cite the costs, but the US already spends more on healthcare than other high-income countries with universal healthcare—and better health outcomes. It is expensive to maintain a broken system.
Major change is challenging but not impossible. Most Americans are dissatisfied with the costs, shortcomings, and complexities of our current healthcare system and support the idea of universal healthcare. We have the resources, expertise, and innovation to create a healthcare system that works for everyone. What we have not yet shown is the courage to do it.
As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, we should be asking what kind of nation we want to be. Do we accept being the only high-income country where getting sick can cost you your home, your job, or your life? Or do we finally build a system that treats healthcare as a public good rather than a commodity?
If the president really wants to “make America Healthy Again,” he can—through real healthcare reform. And for the rest of us, instead of just waiting to see what happens with the ACA subsidies, we can all work to build broad coalitions and support politicians who have a bold vision for healthcare and the courage to actually make a change.
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Let's Get Real: US Healthcare Is an Industry, Not a System
Insurance and hospital corporations embrace higher profits over patient safety.
Dec 05, 2025
This is your nurse. We called him Doug.
a camera monitor is used in patient rooms on August 2025 at HCA/Healthcare. (Photo by Donna Smith)
Some days we didn’t see a nurse for entire shifts—and only for medication delivery and scanning the bar codes for payment. This is also your patient technician. Oh, wait, techs are in short supply, and the robot camera doesn’t do hands-on patient care. This camera isn't even your fall-risk protection. The camera watches as you fall to record your missteps and guard against liability.
And with the help of every hospital administrator and every one of its complicit employees who have given themselves over to its inhumanity, the medical-financial-industrial complex (MFIC) has evolved to put patients in their places. It is an industry driving nearly one-fifth of the country’s economy—it is not a system.
Patients are widgets, at best, deserving of protection only to the extent that our profitability remains intact. Once the costs of delivering care exceed the revenue generated by our health insurance coverage or bank balances, the MFIC finds ways to turn that equation back to solid gold. The profits are dear. Your health is not the goal. That’s an industry, not a system.
We have an industry that uses patients as widgets and counts profits as the only desired measure of success.
Calling the US healthcare mess a system is the softening of economic terminology that drives the health industry ever forward to higher profit margins. Patients receiving care are medical losses to the insurance side of the house, while those same patients are revenue line items for hospitals and clinics. Our lives are not being protected, and our personal resources are often drained. Industry and greed do that, not health systems designed to heal and serve.
This year is on track to bring record profits to hospitals in Denver like the one in which my husband was trying to heal from complications of hip replacement surgery. Denver area hospitals did great this year and last, even if they try to dance around the facts behind their business successes, and corporate public relations staff work hard to keep the public out of that loop.
Look at the newspaper’s description of the profits. Do you see or hear the measures of how many patients were made healthier by their care? Nope. The measures are almost all business and economics—this is an industry, not a system.
Denver hospitals, in 2024, per the Denver Post:
- AdventHealth: $68.6 million loss, -4.5% margin
- CommonSpirit Health: $222.2 million profit, 9.2% margin (Kaiser patients must now use this hospital too)
- Denver Health: $52.9 million loss, -4.1% margin
- HCA HealthOne: $616.8 million profit, 21.3% margin (my hubby helped boost this number for 2025)
- Intermountain Health: $138.3 million loss, -6.5% margin
- UCHealth: $1.2 billion profit, 17.9% margin (nonprofit, for sure, eh?)
If you choose any city in the country, the consolidation of business interests in healthcare is rapidly making the measure of success one of profits built on the backs of the patients-widgets, their home caregivers who are used in hospital settings as unpaid staff, and taxpayers giving tax breaks to large hospitals corporations to build and expand their services to more paying customers—patients-widgets.
For many years, I have advocated for an expanded and improved Medicare for All coverage plan for all of us. We all pay in already, yet we still pay huge insurance premiums to health insurance companies that simply process paper. Why are we doing that? The coverage we all already pay for in payroll and other taxes is not a welfare plan or socialized medicine. I dare say we’d all be healthier if it were. Medicare as it stands covers our elderly and many disabled people through taxes.
If we improved that and expanded Medicare, private premiums would go away and we could all choose whoever and wherever we wanted to seek care. No government hospitals or doctors to screen care—that’s a lie the profit engine needs to push out. I am 100% in favor of getting the profit motive out of hospital care as much as possible. Greed knows no limits, and greed does not belong as a measure of our health.
This health industry is a largely unregulated mess. You know it, and I know it. It’s time to speak the truth about it—the United States does not have a health system. We have an industry that uses patients as widgets and counts profits as the only desired measure of success. Making money is a fine thing so long as it doesn’t mean lying about how we do it. We fuel our economy on suffering and illness, and without the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act-ACA-Obamacare subsidies, the health industry will be even more attentive to their bottom line. You ready?
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Warfare Over Healthcare: My Premium Skyrockets to $2600 Per Month
For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. And for what? Multi-trillion-dollar wars and endless tax breaks for the wealthy.
Nov 25, 2025
Next year, an estimated 5 million people will be priced out of health insurance in the United States. I am one of them. When I went to renew my family’s policy, I was shocked to discover my premium had gone up to $2,600 per month, a price my household of four simply cannot afford. For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when health insurance already makes access to healthcare costly with extremely unrealistic deductibles and high out-of-pocket costs. Yet, as a woman in my 40s with a family history of breast cancer, going without coverage is a gamble with my life.
After some number-crunching, we concluded that we could afford to carry insurance for only 2 of the 4 of us. This left us with an inhuman choice: to decide whose lives we value more. This is not just an abstract dilemma that many households are facing; it is necropolitics in action, the state-sanctioned power to decide who lives and dies. This crisis is a direct result of political choices made by those elected to serve the people and their needs. By allowing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to expire, our elected officials are acting as death panels, comfortable with making a decision that will kill off tens of thousands of their own constituents. This is not hyperbole; studies show that over 40,000 people in the US die annually due to a lack of healthcare.
However, these domestic necropolitics are merely a symptom of the US’ larger death wish: a war economy that serves weapons manufacturers whose job is to create machines of death and destruction. As a nation, we manage to muster up trillions each year to fund global conflict and destruction while claiming the price of keeping our own alive is too much. Our government’s priorities could not be any clearer. For example, in the recent government shutdown, the National Priorities Project reported that the Senate managed to find bipartisan unity to approve a $32 billion increase for the Pentagon as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passing it with an overwhelming 77-20 vote. Yet, they refused to extend the healthcare subsidies for even a single year, a measure that would have cost roughly $35 billion, a well-worth sum that would keep millions, including myself, from losing their health insurance.
This is not a one-off, though. Congress passes an ever-growing Pentagon budget every year, now set to exceed a trillion dollars. The 2026 NDAA will be voted on in mid-December. Around the same time, there are whispers of a vote on the healthcare subsidies that could save millions of families from our nightmare. However, only one of these bills is certain to pass with little debate, and it is not the one that will save lives.
We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die.
To understand the deadly consequences of these priorities, consider that the annual cost of continuing the ACA subsidies is about $30 billion, or roughly $82 million per day. The daily cost of operating a single US aircraft carrier is approximately $8 million. This means that the cost of one carrier for a single day is equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of providing healthcare subsidies for the entire nation. In other words, the funds spent on one warship for just one day could instead ensure a day of healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The math makes it clear that the US government is not in the business of serving the people and their needs. Instead, our elected officials sit in high places, callously deciding who they are willing to kill off in order protect their personal vested interest, whether it be Palestinians in Gaza, children in Sudan, boaters in Venezuela, migrants seeking a better life, or hard-working families desperately trying to make ends meet in an economy that only serves a few rather than the many. We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die. It is necropolitics, all the way down, and we are all on the chopping block. Unless…
To learn more about how to fund the people's needs over war manufacturers' greed, please visit our Cut The Pentagon website for more ways to take action.
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