Trump wants your vote before he takes your healthcare away Opinion | Trump wants your vote before he takes your healthcare away

The number of Americans with healthcare coverage continues to plummet.

That so-called One Big Beautiful Budget Bill passed in 2025 has dumped 4.2 million people off the Affordable Care Act, about a half-million more than was initially expected, because it ended Affordable Care Act subsidies that helped low-income Americans afford insurance.

Coupled with an estimated 3.8 million Americans losing Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program coverage over the same period, an astounding 8 million Americans now have lost health care coverage thanks to Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress.

As some have pointed out, that figure eclipses the populations of all but 13 states and is approximately the size of New York City.

Those who keep tabs on Americans' healthcare suggest that this is just the beginning. Also included in that "beautiful" bill were cuts to tax credits for working families that, too, are causing health insurance premiums to double.

The healthcare industry believes that when the dust settles on his legislation, 15 million people will lose their healthcare, either because they're now ineligible or they simply can't afford it.

That budget bill, OK'd by every one of Wisconsin's GOP members of Congress, represented the biggest rollback of federal support for healthcare in American history. It reverses the gains made when Congress passed the ACA in 2010, the signature legislation of Barack Obama's presidency, to address an American embarrassment: 50 million of its people had no healthcare coverage in the world's richest country.

Within two years, more than 20 million secured health insurance, and millions more benefitted from the expansion of Medicaid for low-income elderly and working families. Even those who fought its passage came to agree that it was a success.

But Trump and the Republicans weren't done with cutting help for those fighting to make ends meet. The "big beautiful" bill also slashed at least $120 billion from SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps), reducing food assistance for low-income families as well.

The cuts were necessary, Americans were told, so that the country could continue the tax cuts it enacted under Trump's first term in office, cuts that meant little to the average taxpayer but showered millions on those in the upper income brackets.

Something had to be cut, they railed, and of course it was those who needed help the most and who were the easiest targets - those they could label as leeches on subsidized healthcare and food giveaways. Besides, they claimed, the programs were riddled with fraud.

Not that there's no fraud and grifting among the millionaire and billionaire classes who have been lavished with big tax savings.

A Congressional Budget Office's analysis suggested when the bill was being debated that it would redistribute wealth from the poorest to the richest Americans over the next decade, and that's exactly what's happening now.

But it's funny - or perhaps sad is a better word - that billions taken from those on the bottom half of the American economy are suddenly available for all kinds of spending that frankly would put the proverbial drunken sailor to shame.

Like a war in the Mideast that no one wanted and no one in the world's greatest democracy approved. Just the whim of an out-of-control maniac who sees no problem throwing $100 billion (about the size of the ACA subsidies) at a ludicrous war that even if won will not benefit anyone.

That war is costing those Americans who now can't afford healthcare thousands more in increased gas prices so they can get to work, and even more at the grocery store.

Or the close to $1 billion the Trump administration is planning to spend on White House construction, much of it taxpayer money, and none of it approved by Congress. His ballroom, for instance, is undoubtedly an illegal expenditure, but he'll build it nevertheless.

Or how about the millions wasted on a Reflecting Pool remake, or gold-plated fountains on the Ellipse and, of course, the hundreds of millions he hopes to spend by bullying through an arch to honor himself.

And while spending all this money, how about the impact on the national debt he promised to reduce, which now exceeds $40 trillion and is costing $1 trillion a year in interest. How much of that could have gone to help the poor with food stamps?

That "big beautiful" bill that Wisconsin congressmen like Tom Tiffany, Scott Fitzgerald, Bryan Steil and the others so eloquently defend is adding $4 trillion to that debt in the next few years alone.

Did someone say that this administration has its priorities mixed up?

No, I'd say things are going just the way they planned them.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times. dzweifel@madison.com, 608-252-6410 and on Twitter @DaveZweifel.

Distributed by Newsbank, inc.