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healthcare
'Eight Million Americans Have Lost Their Healthcare': Trump-GOP Cuts Wreak Havoc in All 50 States
“Eight million Americans have lost their health care because Donald Trump and Republicans decided they would rather hand out tax breaks to billionaires than protect working families," said Brad Woodhouse, the president of Protect Our Care. "Every day that healthcare becomes more expensive, a family is forced to make an impossible choice between putting food on the table and staying covered, a senior is forced to ration their medication, and an expectant mother has to travel farther to access maternity care."
In Maine, where Democrats are looking to finally unseat vulnerable Sen. Susan Collins, more than 18,700 people have lost Medicaid, CHIP, or ACA coverage under the Republican budget law. Included in that total are the more than 7,500 Mainers who dropped ACA marketplace coverage after premiums soared due to the lapse of enhanced subsidies at the end of 2025.
Collins voted to advance GOP budget legislation that included the devastating Medicaid cuts, but voted against final passage.
Protect Our Care noted that "Maine hospitals and clinics are facing a $38 million loss in funding and a 6.7% spike in uncompensated care demand that will affect their ability to keep their doors open."
"As of August 2026, 20 Maine healthcare providers are at-risk, announced cuts, are closing, or have closed," the group added.
More than 25,600 Alaskans have lost health coverage under the Republican budget law and premiums have surged by an average of 346% this year, according to Protect Our Care's fact sheets.
US Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who along with Collins is seen as one of the most vulnerable Republicans this election cycle, voted for the more than $900 billion in Medicaid cuts.
"From Alaska to Florida, these people are our neighbors, our parents, our kids, and they’re sick of paying the price for Republicans’ greed," Woodhouse said on Tuesday. "They deserve better, and in November they will demand it at the ballot box.”
Medicare for All Would Be $40 Trillion Cheaper Than Our Shitty For-Profit System
The Cato Institute put out an analysis last week intended to terrify America of the DSA agenda.
Unfortunately for them, math was not on their side.
The people that are trying to terrify us about doing things differently weren’t able to get their math to work because, guess what? It turns out it’s more effective, efficient, and cost-effective to cover everybody all at the same time from one pool of cash.
Their own analysis suggests universal healthcare saves Americans between $40 trillion and $4 trillion over the next decade, depending on how well we implement it.
They reckon that universal health care would cost anywhere between $40 trillion and $75 trillion. What they what I failed to mention is that the current, albeit shitty, health care system we have now is projected to cost around $80 trillion over that same stretch.
Both of Cato’s estimates, their low one and their absolute worst case, save America money over the current system. The people that are trying to terrify us about doing things differently weren’t able to get their math to work because, guess what? It turns out it’s more effective, efficient, and cost-effective to cover everybody all at the same time from one pool of cash.
So if we actually implemented it efficiently and did it well, if America did the thing where we’re the best country on the planet, then that would mean we save about $40 trillion over the next 10 years. Which would be more than enough money to ramp up the needed supply side of our health care system. It would be more than enough money, while still saving money, to build new hospitals and clinics, reopen rural hospitals and clinics, training a generation of medical professionals, revive the health care deserts in thousands of American counties, and have cash to spare.
We can have more for less. That’s the crazy thing here: more for less.
This isn’t some former AOC/Bernie lefty fella saying this. It’s a libertarian, right-wing institute think tank telling us that just moving to DSA’s big idea version of Medicare for All will free up enough money from the American economy to satisfy build a world class healthcare system.
It turns out, if you look under the hood just a little bit at the engines that drive our economy (whether it’s health care, education, child care, infrastructure, scientific research, or pharmaceutical production), you’ll see that there is massive waste, fraud, and abuse. The waste, fraud, and abuse happens after we write the checks. The problem is when the US becomes an ATM for corporations big and small.
When we go after the waste, fraud, and abuse at the level of the corporations that are scamming us, robbing us blind, then we find that there is a significant savings. We can have more for less. That’s the crazy thing here: more for less.
Just fixing the one element of our healthcare system of who pays for it, let alone restructuring the entire system itself. We turn an $80 trillion machine of denial, waiting, telephone calls, and endless questions of “Are they in my network or are they not?” into a 50% savings that takes away much of that irritation.
I say we can do even better than that.
Healthcare as a utility. Doctors, nurses, dentists, all the folks who make up that system, as plentiful as electricity and water. As easy to reach as the tap and the light switch. There’d be nothing left to fight over.
What if our health care system was as trusted as the fire department? When your kitchen’s ablaze and you dial 911, you know a red truck and excited, ready-to-go people are coming to help you.
That can only be done by changing the way we do it. Not writing bigger checks to the same middlemen. Building it. Training the doctors. Pouring the concrete. Running it ourselves, like we’ve done before, like we can do again.
Cato wrote this report to scare us off, but if you just look at it, it’s the best news we could have gotten.
'This Man Is So Out of Touch': Hakeem Jeffries Slammed for Opposition to Medicare for All
But pressed by Welker if he "personally" supports Medicare for All at this time, Jeffries said, "No," explaining that "it’s not legislation that I currently am co-sponsoring or that I support."
The remarks were hardly surprising, but landed hard for critics, who quickly pointed out that a new CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday showed—as survey after survey has also documented—that hunger for Medicare for All among Democratic voters is remarkably high.
As Common Dreams reported last week, a recent Yale University study found that Medicare for All, as drafted in a bill by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), would save over 114,000 lives annually and $1 trillion per year in US healthcare spending.
In the poll, conducted between Aug. 12-14, a full 90% of Democratic voters said they would "like to see the Democratic Party focus on plans for passing Medicare for All," compared to just 10% who said it should not be a focus.
"A reminder that the vast majority of Democrats across the country support Medicare for All," said progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan in response to Jeffries' answer on the question. "This man is so out of touch with his party. How is he their leader?"
The Lever's David Sirota also issued a rebuke, explaining that Jeffries' comments, juxtaposed with the CBS/YouGov poll, show exactly "why Democratic voters are so enraged."
Also notable from the poll were responses to two questions that preceded the question about the specific policies Democrats should focus on.
Asked if it was more important for the Democratic Party to "show they are fighting for people" or that "they have detailed policies," 83% said it was more important for Democrats to show they are fighting, while just 17% said detailed policies were more important. Similarly, when it came to economic issues, voters—by a 68% to 29% margin—said they'd prefer "big or fundamental changes in policies and approach, even if they are harder to do" compared to those who wanted "smaller or incremental changes to policies and approach, that might be easier to do."
Appearing after Jeffries on "Meet the Press," Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a top ally of Sanders and a current co-sponsor of the Medicare for All Bill introduced earlier this year in the House, disagreed with the Minority Leader's position.
"Medicare for All is arguably the most important priority," Khanna said. "It would save money, and it would save lives. Look, there was just a Yale study that came out. It would save $1 trillion in terms of costs, in terms of health care."
Asked by Welker if he was "disappointed" in Jeffries' remarks, Khanna said that while "I respect the difference" of opinion, "I will say this: it needs to have a vote on the House floor."
"The majority of the House Democrats are going to support it," he continued. "It is one of the most important policies if you actually believe in saving lives and in helping increase wages for working-class Americans. You talk to folks, and they’ll say, 'The biggest thing that pushes me into bankruptcy is if someone gets cancer. And I can’t afford the bills.' And even people who have insurance, look at how many premiums have been increasing. This would save money for ordinary Americans. And it would increase their wages. It’s the single biggest roadblock in our economic system hurting working families."
In a social media post on Sunday, Sanders—while not mentioning the latest comments by Jeffries—said, "Our current healthcare system is broken. Progressives understand healthcare must be a human right, guaranteed to all, not a source of billions in profits for insurance and drug companies.
"A recent poll showed 64% of Americans want Medicare for All," added Sanders. "They’re right. Let’s do it."
Advocates Call for End of Deadly Tactic Used by For-Profit Health Insurers to Deny Treatment
The policy brief, published Monday by the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an anti-monopoly think tank, argues that the system is a massive drag on the US healthcare system, draining doctors of their time, fueling hiring shortages, and—most importantly—worsening treatable health problems for millions of Americans.
"This practice has massive financial and human costs, as I know personally from my family’s own tragic experience,” said the report's author, Hannah Garden-Monheit—a senior fellow at the AELP, whose late father was denied rehab by UnitedHealthcare after cancer forced his leg to be amputated.
"Prior authorization may have started as a narrow cost-control tool," she explained. "But it’s mushroomed into private insurers’ strategy for diverting resources from care toward their own profits. It’s time to ban prior authorization as we know it.”
The report examines how prior authorization went from a tool used sparingly to prevent payment for unnecessary treatments to what Garden-Monheit and co-author, AELP senior healthcare fellow Emma Freer, described as a "corporate care veto."
Around 1 in 5 adults with private insurance report that they or a family member had experienced a coverage denial in the past year, with 28% reporting that it worsened their health problem, according to a June survey from the Commonwealth Fund.
While insurers claim that their decisions to deny care are "evidence-based," the authors say that "in reality, the practice empowers distant corporate entities with a financial conflict of interest to override the professional judgment of physicians with firsthand knowledge of patients’ medical needs."
"There is generally little to no transparency or accountability for these decisions," the authors wrote.
While insurers claim that denials are reviewed by qualified clinicians, one survey from the American Medical Association (AMA) found that only 16% of physicians participating in peer-to-peer reviews reported that the “peer” was often or always qualified.
Garden-Monheit said United denied her father's claim multiple times, first citing his cancer diagnosis—the reason his leg was amputated in the first place—then by claiming that he had made significant enough "progress" that paying for rehab was unnecessary. The "progress" was that he "had figured out how to hop on one leg from his hospital bed to a chair."
Garden-Monheit describes how she, her father, and their care team were forced to navigate a "bureaucratic maze" by United, which ultimately led them to give up.
"At least twice, I learned of a denial only after calling United to check on the status of their request. They hadn’t even bothered with a letter," she said. "While the lines of communication felt frustratingly unpredictable, the answers always led to the same place: 'no.'"
As she explained in a recent op-ed for MS NOW: "My family’s experience wasn’t a one-off glitch. For United, the system was working as designed."
Former United chief medical officer Dr.Archelle Georgiou estimated that across just two Medicare Advantage plans from United and Humana, the companies save an estimated $100 million per year by denying claims that never get appealed. She said that's a "conservative estimate." Across the two plans, 1.75 million people were denied care, even after appeal.
While insurers pad their profits, patients suffer, the researchers found. Among people reporting a prior authorization denial, 41% said it delayed their care and 28% said their health problem worsened, according to the Commonwealth survey.
"My family’s experience wasn’t a one-off glitch. For United, the system was working as designed."
Meanwhile, the AMA survey found that 95% of physicians said that prior authorization delays care, 79% said it causes patients to abandon recommended treatments, and more than 1 in 4 doctors said it has caused a serious adverse event, including hospitalization, permanent impairment, or death.
Denied timely treatments, many patients end up paying for costly and ineffective alternatives that only make their situations worse and cause the costs to increase down the line.
"It was extremely difficult to obtain authorizations for substance abuse treatment when I covered the emergency department as a practicing psychologist," one healthcare professional, identified in the report as Nancy, said. "Other times, in my private practice, I would get authorizations and later experience ‘clawbacks’ where Blue Cross, for example, would decide the treatment was not medically necessary and take back the money already paid."
"It is impossible at times to provide sound ethical treatment and extremely hard to make a living," she said, "when reimbursement rates kept going down, and the insurance companies could take back the money they had already paid for no obvious reason.”
Prior authorization doesn't just deny care to patients. It also creates piles of paperwork for their doctors, taking away precious time that could be dedicated to their care.
The report found that physicians and their teams now spend so much on prior authorization paperwork that it consumes the equivalent of nearly 100,000 full-time physician and advanced practice clinician workloads, plus more than 213,000 clinic staff, costing as much as $32.7 billion each year. If prior authorization were eliminated, they found, it would free up enough capacity to turn a national physician shortage into a surplus.
(Graphic: American Economic Liberties Project)
A YouGov poll for AELP found that more than two-thirds of voters in both parties want legislation banning prior authorization outright. But the researchers said both the Trump and Biden administrations have enacted only minor reforms that "fail to address the structural conflict of interest that underpins the corporate care veto strategy."
Meanwhile, the industry is making the denial process even more ruthlessly efficient, increasingly deploying artificial intelligence to deny requests en masse.
According to a 2023 class action lawsuit, United's NaviHealth system used a predictive AI model to determine whether Medicare Advantage patients should receive rehabilitation care despite knowing that the model had a 90% error rate.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has expanded prior authorization for traditional Medicare through a pilot program that allows AI models to adjudicate claims in some states. In July, Senate Republicans blocked Democrats' attempt to end the pilot program.
As part of a national pro-AI strategy, Trump has also sought to preempt state laws banning the use of AI to deny care.
The AELP researchers called for a series of reforms to end prior authorization as it currently exists. Among other changes, they said decisions to authorize treatments should be made by independent third parties without the incentive to deny care, that denials must be evidence-based, that the use of AI tools to deny claims should be banned, and that physicians should review patients in person before denying their claims.
“For too long, prior authorization has allowed insurance companies to put profits ahead of patients by overruling doctors and delaying and denying essential care,” Freer said. “This status quo is failing patients, ratcheting up costs, and undermining the basis of effective, expert-informed care. It’s time to end this ‘corporate care veto’ and put medical decisions back where they belong: with patients and their doctors.”
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