Trump is Destroying Americans’ Healthcare

On the eve of the midterm election, American families are feeling financially stressed As the chart above shows, the percentage of families who say that their financial situation is good has plunged. For the first time since the post-Covid inflation of 2022, it has fallen below the percentage who say that their financial situation is bad.

Rising prices are the obvious explanation for this stress. And while presidents usually have much less influence on the economy than is generally recognized, the current outbreak of high inflation is all on Donald Trump. He began this with two wars of choice: one, a trade war with his destructive tariffs, and then an unwinnable military war in the most important energy transit point in the world.

There is, however, a third factor behind Americans’ anger, and it isn’t getting nearly as much attention as it should. There has been a catastrophic decline in health insurance coverage combined with sharply rising premiums for many of those who have managed to hang on to their coverage. And this, too, is all on Trump.

Here’s what happened: Trump and his congressional minions refused to renew the expanded subsidies that had made health insurance affordable for millions of Americans during the Biden years. At the same time the One Big Beautiful Bill imposed punitive work requirements that made it far more difficult for families to obtain Medicaid coverage.

And we haven’t felt the full effect of these changes yet — Republicans tried to backload the effects of the OBBB so that much of the pain will come after the midterms. But the consequences of this attack on healthcare have already been dire.

By June 2026 enrollment in Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program had declined by more than 6 million since January 2025; 2.5 million of those losing coverage were children. KFF estimates that enrollment in individual plans, mainly via the Affordable Care Act, was down almost 5 million by June. The redoubtable Charles Gaba, putting these numbers together with other information, estimates that around 12 million Americans have lost health insurance under Trump 2.0.

That’s a lot of lost coverage, even in a nation as big as ours. And because many of the savage cuts Trump and his allies have imposed on healthcare have yet to kick in, the situation will get much worse in the years ahead. It’s worth noting thatkicking children off healthcare coverage is especially personally and socially destructive because it compromises their health and earnings potential for their entire lifetimes.

By the way, Trump, after all these years, is once again promising that he’ll come up with a “truly great” healthcare plan any day now. He’s now saying that he’ll send money directly to Americans, stopping payments to insurance companies — thereby demonstrating that he still has no idea how insurance works.

In any case, we’re now in the midst of an enormous healthcare disaster — a disaster that is receiving surprisingly little media coverage with, as far as I can tell, no recent articles on massive coverage losses in any of the major newspapers. I know that there’s a lot going on, but this seems odd.

Voters, however, have noticed. KFF’s tracking poll finds that the cost of healthcare is near the top of voters’ economic worries:

As an overall issue, health care ranks second only to the overall cost of living — and above the Iran war:

This ongoing healthcare disaster is all on Trump and his party. And again, voters appear to have noticed, giving Democrats a large and growing edge on the issue:

So if there is a blue wave 13 days from now, it won’t just be the result of inflation and Trump’s vainglorious wars. It will also in part be the result of a quiet but massive healthcare disaster.

And ultimately, of course, the political implications are a secondary concern. What really matters is that Trump and his party have done all they can to deny healthcare to millions of Americans. They have done this partly to save money — not to reduce the budget deficit, but to make room for tax cuts for the wealthy. They have also done it out of sheer cruelty.

There are many terrible things happening in America right now, from the debacle in Iran to the depredations of ICE. But the healthcare disaster, which will ruin many people financially and in some cases kill Americans who can no longer afford essential care, deserves much more attention than it is getting.

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