Yves here. We wrote yesterday about the gimmick of Trump’s pretense that he will cap interest on credit cards at 10% for only a year. Not only won’t it happen because that change would require legislation, but more important because it is a terrible idea. We explained long form that it would hurt ordinary citizens, particularly the most financially stressed and merely inconvenience banks by making them have to rearrange their businesses so as to preserve their rents. There are ways to tackle bank predation by lending to weak borrowers and getting them on an extractive treadmill, but this is not that.
Trump has offered a new page from his bad playbook, of a sketchy healthcare scheme that might look good at a great distance, but falls apart, not just in delivering real benefits but actually working at all.
However, it is disappointing to see reform advocates continue to tout Medicare for All. Medicare is better than a lot of US insurance, but it’s unduly complex with many gaps and is being downgraded to something more like threadbare Medicare Advantage plans.
Twitter is full of catcalls from the peanut gallery. A sample:
🚨🚨BREAKING🚨🚨
Donald Trump has revealed “The Great Healthcare Plan” which will give families $2,000 annually to purchase their own health insurance.
The average annual health insurance premium for a family is $26,000.
His proposal will cover 28 days of health insurance… pic.twitter.com/uAHoM68Oju
— The Green Dragon Tavern (@greendragonhq) January 15, 2026
The Trump administration’s proposal to redirect health subsidies into direct cash payments is not a substitute for a healthcare plan. The Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions are not symbolic they are the product of enforceable rules such as… pic.twitter.com/myo7pvzh4L
— Gavriel E. Toviel (@GavrielEToviel) January 15, 2026
By Brett Wilkins, a staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
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.”
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 blockedby 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.
Trump's new health care plan if it was honest: https://t.co/j0HczIQ44C pic.twitter.com/9n68wMEkgH
— Rep. Brendan Boyle (@CongBoyle) January 15, 2026
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.”
Yves, you mentioned that Medicare is being downgraded. Along with the instituting of prior authorization is six states i understand that CMS has instituted a two tier payment system to begin this year. It will pay doctors more for some kinds of service than others. The little i can glean is that doctors will be paid more for offering preventative interventions like exercise than for more expensive (and often necessary) treatments. I’ve been hoping that someone here could go into the implications of this dual pay scale. It sounds to me like doctors will be paid more for doing less real doctoring.
Medicare for all will happen when medicare has been degraded and .dismantled and not a second sooner
The fact that even Medicare Advantage exceeds the insurance coverage that most Americans can acquire is an indictment of the scam so many of us here are reduced to calling “our country.”
Too bad the Democrat response isn’t much better –
“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 answer is extending Obamacare which was a pro-business plan to begin with?!!!??? That’s a “real solution”??!!!???
Wake me up when we have real universal healthcare (not just single payer) and capitalists are no longer allowed to profit off the illness and misery of others ever again.
I recall when the Ds had both houses and Obama in the WH, but they (Pelosi Obama et al.) said “single payer is off the table”. They told their constituents to f-off and die. Instead we get subsidized kleptocracy/extortion. And the latest BS is just more extortion. I think this is a great example of institutional corruption. If the digruntled Ds don’t like it, whadda they gonna do? Vote Republican? Ha ha ha, joke’s on us.
We aint never gonna get no comprehensive health care in the US, so let’s not hold our breaths. The Soylent Green dark humor jokes aren’t funny anymore…. “too close to home and too near the bone”
Those without the ability to pay the extortion simply die much younger on average and it will get worse. That’s what we call freedom and democracy.
The health care fight that resulted in the ACA largely took place in 2009, after Obama and a new Democratic Congress took office in January. Many presidents and members of Congress had attempted health care reform in the past, but neither party ever had enough control in Congress to get something truly transformational passed.
The opportunity finally came in 2009, when Obama entered office with a large Democratic majority in the House and Senate. Critically, Democrats had 60 seats in the Senate by April (with two independents), which gave them the filibuster proof majority they needed to pass any kind of health care reform. It was that majority and the paramount importance of maintaining it that prevented universal healthcare.
Universal healthcare could never pass a Senate without the 60 votes, and it was a non-starter even in 2009 (many Democrats were moderate then from more conservative states). The House barely passed their version of the bill, and the Senate, with their 60 votes, bypassed the filibuster and passed their version in December.
However, this bill was extraordinarily contentious (the legislative fight ultimately birthed the Tea Party movement and the 2010 Republican sweep in the midterms), and when a Massachusetts special election took place in January 2010 to replace the recently deceased Senator Ted Kennedy, Democrats lost the seat to Republican Scott Brown. This was supposed to be a safe Democratic seat, and the loss not only eliminated the filibuster proof majority, but also spooked Democrats and became a harbinger of things to come in the midterms.
So, they had to decide which bill to now go with – the House version or the Senate version. In order to prevent a second Senate vote, which would likely fail with no way to end the filibuster, Democrats decided to use the Senate version of the ACA, which strategically excluded universal health care or a public option of any kind, to help it pass. The House barely passed this version in March 2010, and Obama signed it into law a few days later.
Even though this bill was a compromise that purposely excluded universal health care to make it palatable to more moderate Democrats, it ultimately led to a summer from hell for Democrats, who faced angry constituents that had been convinced this bill was awful and would make things worse for the average American. Some of that may have been justified, but there was a lot of misinformation that went around as well. As I mentioned, Democrats faced major losses that November in the midterms, and Obama never again had a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress, making the rest of his presidency extremely challenging legislatively.
So there you have it. Universal healthcare is just too politically charged here in the US, and even one party having massive majorities in Congress and the presidency wasn’t enough to get it through. Maybe someday that changes, but the politics have to shift first (or Senate rules).
One must remember that “Obamacare” was originally the Republican health care reform proposal. I had originally thought that it came from the Heritage Foundation in 1993, but apparently the Heritage boys lifted it from another Republican think tank, whose name escapes me (Hoover?), which in turn had published it as far back as 1988. [And so Hillarycare, which also relies on private insurers but transfers the mandate from the individual to the employer, came after, not before…]
In other words, both parties have been focusing exclusively on pro-business “solutions” since…a long time now. Sanders’ major, perhaps biggest, accomplishment is to literally say the words “Medicare for all” out loud, never mind that the idea is thoroughly unworkable given the current realities of the US political system. And by that I mean – Medicare for all schematically relies in large part on the government playing monopsonist to private health care providers, capping prices (reimbursement rates) and so on, which would make selfsame providers squeal to high heaven. And also on “progressivization” of premiums (the bulk is paid by the upper income brackets), which would make those income brackets squeal similarly. Do we seriously expect this Democratic Party to not listen, harken and obey to said squealing, even if somehow, magically, Medicare for all became a thing?
Yes, I remember some were calling it Romneycare
Actually, Romney, as governor of Massachusettes, helped pass, in 2006, a Massachusettes state health care plan that foreshadowed the federal ACA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_health_care_reform