The unprecedented healthcare cuts that President Donald Trump and the Republican Party enacted last summer have impacted people in all 50 US states, stripping insurance coverage from around 8 million Americans total and wreaking havoc on hospitals and other providers nationwide.
The advocacy group Protect Our Care on Tuesday released state-by-state fact sheets detailing how many people have lost Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable Care Act coverage due to Republican policy decisions, including the party’s roughly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid and decision to let enhanced ACA subsidies expire, sending premiums skyrocketing.
I’m very likely to become one of those people without health insurance.
The situation this year was pretty abysmal. The ACA plans increased in price dramatically, while also cutting back on coverage and benefits. The loss of the subsidies was a double whammy.
I went ahead and signed up for insurance this year, but it was practically a coin flip for me at the end and I’m half convinced I fell for the sunk cost fallacy. Basically, I had to spend so much time comparing plans, looking at what was covered, figuring out if I could actually afford the premiums, comparing my estimated total costs (which is not really truly possible because you literally cannot get your hands on that information), etc that it felt like I needed to sign up just so that the whole process wasn’t a waste of time.
In the end, I went with a plan that said it covered my regular prescriptions and for which my current providers were in-network. Only thing is, when it came time to actually get my prescriptions filled, turns out they don’t actually cover them all like they stated when I signed up. Some required prior authorization, and when my provider tried to get that, it was denied. So now I pay out of pocket for that on top of having to pay the health insurance premiums.
And in the end, this is kind of a situation where as bad as 2026 is for health insurance coverage / plans, the sad thing is, this is probably as good as it’ll ever be from here on out until working class folks actually start organizing and working together (across party lines) to change things. So, good luck with that in the USA.