Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
7,479 appearances
87 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 5d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 86 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.
August twentieth, twenty twenty six.
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On Saturday, august fifteenth, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the US.
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The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century.
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Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act or ACA in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance.
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With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below ten percent.
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But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement.
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While they extended Trump's twenty seventeen tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their july twenty twenty five budget reconciliation bill, the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed without a single Democratic vote.
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They refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford health care insurance in the ACA marketplaces.
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The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of health care insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.
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They were unsuccessful and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance.
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A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June twenty twenty six showed that at least five million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about thirteen percent.
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For those remaining, premiums have spiked.
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The editorial board notes that a middle income, middle aged couple with two children could pay an additional thirty five hundred dollars a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts.
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Deductibles also jumped this year by about $1,000 a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.
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Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about a trillion dollars over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid.
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In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a work requirement on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.
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But as the editorial board notes, the work requirement is really a paperwork requirement that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork.
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As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lucas of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.
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They estimated that up to fifteen million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage.
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Showing 2101–2120 of 7,479 · page 106 of 374
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