Millions of Americans are being stripped of Medicaid coverage, while health insurance premiums for those still enrolled have spiked by 14 percent last week, following a 20 percent hike just one year ago. The Trump administration is executing what The Atlantic describes as the most sweeping rollback of social spending in American history. This policy choice directly impacts the native working class, whose access to essential medical care is being systematically eroded.
President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have refused to extend enhanced subsidies for individuals purchasing health insurance on Affordable Care Act exchanges. Democrats had warned since last year that this move would cause millions more people to lose coverage. The Congressional Budget Office projects that by 2028, the number of uninsured Americans will have risen by a third, with almost 10 million losing coverage.
Nearly 3 million Americans lost their health-care coverage last year alone. Hundreds of rural hospitals, vital to many native communities, are now at risk of closing. This escalating crisis highlights a political class seemingly indifferent to the stability and well-being of the nation's citizens.
Elite Interests Exposed
Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mehmet Oz, claimed last month that the administration is cutting benefits for “millions of people, literally, who are getting insurance that they don’t want; they don’t even know they have it.” He asserted that the point of Trump’s subsidy cuts was not to throw people off the program but to strengthen it, stating, “If you care about the ACA, then you’ll want us to take the fraud out.” These claims echo conclusions from the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank, which has alleged that the ACA provided benefits to “improper” beneficiaries.
The Paragon Health Institute’s findings are described as “very questionable.” The group extrapolates from the number of recipients who don’t file any claims, suggesting the program hands out subsidies to people who either don’t exist or don’t want coverage. Health expert Matthew Fiedler of the Brookings Institution examined these claims, concluding that “these data do not provide persuasive evidence that ‘phantom’ enrollments are widespread.” Oz misinterprets Paragon’s study, which asserts 6 million “improper” recipients this year, including 1.5 million ineligible for subsidies. Most of these ineligible recipients are not pretending to be poor; they are inflating their income to qualify for coverage due to a “perverse, Republican-imposed policy.”
This policy emerged after a Supreme Court ruling 14 years ago made Medicaid expansion optional for states. Many red states opted out, creating a gap where the poorest households, below 138 percent of the poverty line, were left without coverage. In nine of these Republican-led states, people desperate for coverage have resorted to inflating their income to obtain insurance, payments that might not be legal but serve very real people.
The Globalist Agenda
While the political class debates the mechanisms of national health care, a more insidious agenda pushes for border erasure and the dismantling of national identity. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform, for example, calls for “ending all immigration enforcement” and “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state.” This transnational vision directly undermines the concept of a sovereign nation with defined borders and a protected citizenry.
Undocumented immigrants, who constitute about a fifth of the uninsured population in the U.S., remained ineligible for coverage under Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. This exclusion, a rare instance of prioritizing citizens, highlights the ongoing tension between national welfare and globalist demands for universal access regardless of national status. The DSA’s focus on “universal government provision of health care” aligns with a broader post-national order, even as the Democratic Party itself has long supported universal health care, dating back to the New Deal era.
Decades of the left refusing to credit Democrats for advocating universal health-care coverage have led many Americans to believe the party doesn’t care about the policy. Polls show only about a third of Americans trust the Democrats more than Republicans on health care, leaving two-thirds feeling otherwise. This internal division within the political establishment further weakens the national capacity to address fundamental citizen needs, leaving the native working class caught in the crossfire of elite ideological battles.