From Coverage to Care, Working Families Pay the Price for Trump’s Health Care Cuts

From Coverage to Care, Working Families Pay the Price for Trump’s Health Care Cuts

The price of health care in the U.S. is out of control. Americans continue to spend record amounts on private insurance and prescription drugs, while seeing worse health outcomes than our peer countries. Recent polling from Fox News shows that health care costs are hurting 81% of Americans, with 51% describing this as a “major problem.” President Trump promised to lower health care prices and improve coverage on the campaign trail, but since taking office, he has only driven these costs higher.

In the nine months since Trump took office, the pace of health care inflation has more than doubled compared to the previous two years. Instead of trying to provide relief for families, Trump and Republicans in Congress are doing everything in their power to make things worse, by:

• Taking away Affordable Care Act enhanced premium tax credits. Trump and Republicans in Congress would rather shut down the government than address the fact that average premiums will more than double for over 22 million Americans in mere weeks. A family of three earning $70,000 will pay an extra $3,017 next year. A 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 will pay an extra $18,080 – more than a fifth of their income.

• Jacking up premiums on all health insurance. Premiums are set to increase in 2026 by an average of 18% in the individual market and 11% for small businesses. Most large employers also plan to increase costs for employees as premiums rise by an average of 9%, the largest increase in 15 years. Trump and the GOP engineered this mess through changes to the ACA, chaotic tariff policies, failure to control inflation, and refusal to reign in private insurers.

• Gutting Medicaid and raising copays. The Republican budget law cut Medicaid by over $900 billion – imposing burdensome paperwork requirements on consumers, forcing states to cut spending, lowering Medicaid’s service quality, and requiring states to impose new cost-sharing on consumers. Up to 14.9 million Americans will lose their coverage.

• Hollowing out Medicare. The Trump Administration recently announced a program bringing AI-driven prior authorization to traditional Medicare. This technology is notorious for causing delays and even life-threatening denials in Medicare Advantage and commercial plans. The Republican budget law also makes it harder for low-income Medicare enrollees to qualify for additional assistance on their premiums, deductibles, coinsurance, and copays. And absent intervention, the law will trigger $535 billion in Medicare cuts within the next ten years.

• Shuttering rural hospitals and nursing homes. America’s rural health infrastructure was already at a breaking point before the GOP began its all-out health care offensive. Now, another 338 rural hospitals and 579 nursing homes are at high risk of closure. Medicaid cuts have already forced a rural health clinic in Nebraska to close and a rural Georgia hospital to discontinue its labor and delivery unit, adding hours of travel for residents seeking necessary medical care.

• Hiking the cost of prescription drugs. American patients pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. Despite some well-publicized theatrics, the GOP has done nothing to reign in pharmaceutical companies. Since Trump took office, the prices of 688 drugs have increased. In July, Trump sent letters to drug companies demanding lower prices “within the next 60 days,” but 15 of those 17 companies have increased their prices under his watch. Meanwhile, the Republican budget law restricts Medicare’s ability to negotiate lower prices for some blockbuster drugs.

• Slashing federal medical debt protection for 15 million Americans. The Trump Administration helped kill a rule that would have removed roughly $49 billion of medical debt from the credit reports of about 15 million people. The rule would have increased access to credit and protected against coercive debt practices.

• Making vaccines more expensive. As RFK Jr. guts vaccine guidance and puts children – and all Americans – at risk, Republicans also terminated a program offering free COVID-19 vaccines to uninsured adults, imposing costs on 25-30 million people for COVID vaccinations.

To download a PDF copy of this report, click HERE.