10 egregious things you may not know about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

  Congressional Republicans passed a radical budget and tax bill—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—on a party-line vote. Many of the plan’s key elements will increase families’ costs for health care, food, and utilities—such as historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as terminating tax credits to produce more American-made energy—and are deeply unpopular according to recent survey data. Several provisions, however, remain less understood because they’ve received less media attention or were added during rushed negotiations that took place overnight and behind closed doors.

  This article details several lesser-known provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that will increase costs and limit Americans’ ability to meet their basic needs; create a slush fund for Trump administration overreach; and waste taxpayer money.

US health care is rife with high costs and deep inequities, and that’s no accident – a public health historian explains how the system was shaped to serve profit and politicians

  A few years ago, a student in my history of public health course asked why her mother couldn’t afford insulin without insurance, despite having a full-time job. I told her what I’ve come to believe: The U.S. health care system was deliberately built this way.

  People often hear that health care in America is dysfunctional – too expensive, too complex, and too inequitable. But dysfunction implies failure. What if the real problem is that the system is functioning exactly as it was designed to? Understanding this legacy is key to explaining not only why reform has failed repeatedly, but why change remains so difficult.

5 ways Project 2025 puts profits over patients

  Project 2025, the far-right extremist agenda developed by the Heritage Foundation, would increase the power of corporations at the expense of Americans’ health and well-being. It would give more control to health care companies—including some of the most profitable companies in the world—by jeopardizing protections that help many patients access and afford the care they need. Project 2025 would also take us back to a time when corporations were free to pump dangerous toxins into the air we breathe and the water we drink. If Project 2025’s plan for a far-right administration takes effect, corporations will profit while patients are saddled with high bills, less accessible health care, more exposure to toxins, and more harmful health conditions.

Why it’s hard for the US to cut or even control Medicare spending

  President Joe Biden’s 2024 proposed budget includes plans to shore up the finances of Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers Americans who are 65 and up and some younger people with disabilities.

  His administration aims to increase from 3.8% to 5% an existing Medicare tax that’s collected on the labor and investment earnings of Americans who make more than US$400,000 annually. It also aims to reap some savings from having the government negotiate prices on more prescription drugs.

Seven things President-elect Biden can achieve on health care

  President-elect Joe Biden has plenty of work ahead of him; reining in the out-of-control pandemic tops the list, and beyond that, there are significant challenges on health care in general.

Four myths about the public option

  The idea of a public option for health insurance has become increasingly politicized. Insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and powerful hospital systems—all groups that profit from the status quo—are attempting to stir up fears about a plan that would actually help American families. In reality, a public option would lower costs, save American families money, and allow private insurance plans to continue to compete. The public option also remains a popular path for reform with growing support: A recent survey shows that 2 in 3 voters support a public option. In this column, the Center for American Progress sets the record straight on what a public option would do and discusses four common misconceptions about the plan.

Poor U.S. pandemic response will reverberate in health care politics for years, health scholars warn

  Much has been written about the U.S. coronavirus response. Media accounts frequently turn to experts for their insights – commonly, epidemiologists or physicians. Countless surveys have also queried Americans and individuals from around the world about how the pandemic has affected them and their attitudes and opinions.

  Yet little is known about the views of a group of people particularly well qualified to render judgment on the U.S.‘s response and offer policy solutions: academic health policy and politics researchers. These researchers, like the two of us, come from a diverse set of disciplines, including public health and public policy. Their research focuses on the intricate linkages between politics, the U.S. health system, and health policy. They are trained to combine applied and academic knowledge, take broader views, and be fluent across multiple disciplines.

The Trump administration treats seniors as expendable

  Amid a pandemic in which seniors have been disproportionately infected and killed, the Trump administration and its allies continue to fail at protecting seniors’ health care access. By downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic and failing to act, and discounting the impact of the coronavirus on seniors with preexisting conditions, the Trump administration and its allies are letting down older adults and those who love them. Meanwhile, the administration continues to push for repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which would cause seniors’ out-of-pocket premiums and prescription drug costs to soar, and to punt on prescription drug pricing reform. In the middle of a historic health crisis, the Trump administration has left seniors behind.

While the U.S. is reeling from COVID-19, the Trump administration is trying to take away health care

  The death toll from COVID-19 keeps rising, creating grief, fear, loss, and confusion.

  Unfortunately for us all, the pain only begins there. Other important health policy news that would ordinarily make headlines is buried under the crushing weight of the coronavirus. Many have not had time to notice or understand the Trump administration’s efforts to wreck health care coverage.

Coercion and charity are opposites

  The entire welfare-state way of life is based on the concept of force. Through the threat of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, and fines, the American people are forced to be good, caring, and compassionate to others.

  Here is how the process works. People are forced to deliver a percentage of their income to the federal government, which in turn delivers the money to others. It’s not a 100 percent turnover, of course, because some of the money is used to cover the expenses associated with performing this service, such as salaries for bureaucrats in the IRS and in the federal departments, and agencies that distribute the money.

Who actually pays tariffs?

  Donald Trump’s economic ignorance knows no bounds. And especially when it comes to the subject of trade.

  Trade is always a win-win proposition. In every exchange, each party gives up something valued less for something valued more. Each party to a transaction values differently the goods or services being exchanged. Each party anticipates a gain from the exchange or there would be no commerce between the two parties. And each party will repeat the exchange again if its estimated gain has proved to be satisfactory.

Conservatives are using the courts to attack health care for all Americans

  Conservative state officials, in conjunction with the Trump administration, have launched an all-out attack on health care in the United States. They have brought a suit to overturn the entirety of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which would have serious consequences for nearly every American who has health coverage, whether through their employer, the individual market, Medicare, or Medicaid. And they found a partisan judge who proved willing to ignore the rule of law and help them advance their political agenda through the courts.

Trump's unwitting devotion to socialism

  Donald Trump and, unfortunately, many of his conservative followers, are absolutely clueless when it comes to socialism. You couldn’t find a better example of this phenomenon than a Trump op-ed that was published in USA Today recently. In fact, Trump’s op-ed is a perfect demonstration of the life of the lie that has come to afflict the entire conservative movement.

  In his op-ed, Trump takes Democrats to task for supporting “Medicare for All,” which would essentially be a full-fledged socialist healthcare system. He says that this shows that Democrats are committed to turning the United States into another Venezuela, a country in chaos, crisis, poverty, and violence owing to its socialist economic system.

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1578: When we lose our health, we lose everything

  When we have our health, we have everything. The old folks repeated this saying to us over and over. I have come to understand that while we may not have everything when we have our health, we have a great deal that is a critical foundation to our getting everything we need. Moreover, I’ve heard people say, “I would give everything to have my good health again.”

  We must have doctors to have our health. We must have nurses to have our health. We must have hospitals to have our health. We must have nursing homes to have our health. We must also have other health-related institutions to have our health. When we have our health, we have a chance to get everything we need. When we lose our health, we lose everything.

The War on Medicaid is moving to the states

  In the early 1960s, as the Johnson administration worked to enact Medicare and Medicaid, then-actor Ronald Reagan traveled the country as a spokesman for the American Medical Association, warning of the danger the legislation posed to the nation. “Behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country,” he said in one widely distributed speech. “Until one day … you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

  Reagan set the tone for a conservative war against Medicaid that is now in its 52nd year. Recent congressional proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would have reduced Medicaid enrollment by up to 15 million people, and, despite being defeated, congressional Republicans aren’t done yet: It’s likely they will attempt to gut the program during the upcoming budget debate. Meanwhile, more than half a dozen conservative governors are trying to take a hatchet to the program—at the open invitation of the Trump administration—through a vehicle known as a “Medicaid waiver.”

Richard M. Ebeling: The national debt limit equals a balanced budget

  Once again the United States government is rapidly approaching a fiscal debt ceiling: After March 16, 2017, Uncle Sam will not be legally allowed to borrow any more money to cover its budget deficits, unless Congress votes to raise the debt limit, once again, like it has every time in the past.

  Uncle’s Sam’s debt has been growing at a frightening rate over the last several decades. It took almost two hundred years, from around 1790, when the government of the United States was established, to 1980 for the federal government to accumulate $1 trillion of debt through deficit spending.

House GOP proposals would make health coverage less secure for all Americans

  Seven years after first promised, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) has released a vague policy white paper that outlines how House Republicans would attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act, which has expanded health insurance coverage to more than 20 million Americans since 2010 at a cost of billions of dollars less than expected. The document is a comprehensive list of conservatives’ recycled, unpopular ideas. Instead of designing a health care system that works for all Americans, the paper outlines a plan to quarantine people who are old and/or sick in separate, more expensive, and unsustainable markets. These reforms would transfer assistance from low-income people to high-income people and from the sick to the healthy. They would not only raise costs for older and less healthy Americans but also would destabilize the entire health care system, shift costs to patients and families, and make everyone’s coverage less secure.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Help the poor by abolishing the income tax

  The standard leftist position on helping the poor is: Increase income taxes on the rich and give the money to the poor in the form of welfare. The idea is that it’s just not fair that someone has more money when someone has less money. By equalizing people’s financial conditions, through the force of a progressive income tax and a welfare state, the financial plight of the poor will be improved.

  The left, however, is wrong. As our American ancestors, who lived without income taxation for more than a century, learned, the best way to help the poor would be by abolishing the income tax (and the IRS).

Robert E. Moffit: Here's how Congress can save Medicare

  When will Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund run out of money? A newly released report from the Medicare Trustees says it will be exhausted in 2028—two years earlier than they projected last year. Using slightly different assumptions, the Congressional Budget Office earlier predicted that the trust fund would be insolvent by 2026.

  No matter how you slice it, the fund meets neither short-term nor long-term standards of “financial adequacy” (to use the trustees’ term). But the Trust Fund’s precarious financial state is merely the symptom of a more serious problem: the growth of Medicare spending and financial burdens on seniors and taxpayers.

New Medicare and Medicaid services proposal tests ways to lower drug expenditures

  The current payment methodology for drugs covered under Medicare Part B, which includes costly physician-administered drugs, does not work for patients. It encourages drug companies to charge sky-high prices and creates financial incentives to overprescribe higher-priced drugs, increasing patient costs. This is why the Center for American Progress strongly supports a proposal by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, to test new ways to pay for these medications.