OP-ED: Trump's Healthcare Plan is DOA

Still mostly a “concept” of a plan and "woefully short on substance."

Feb 19, 2026

By Jay Brock
GUEST WRITER

a stethoscope and a heart on top of money — Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Many Americans have been waiting for years for President Donald Trump to finally reveal the details of his “concept” of a plan to fix our broken health insurance system, and in January he released it. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, it appears to be D.O.A.—Dead on Arrival.

For starters, consisting of only a few pages, it’s still mostly a “concept” of a plan, a feel-good word salad that might sound soothing to the ear (lowering costs; holding insurance companies accountable) but is woefully short on substance. Its most memorable and perhaps most meaningless proposal is to give certain needy Americans money that they will in turn spend on their monthly health insurance premiums, as if this would somehow magically bring down the cost of the premiums.

The plan proposes “lowering” the price of medications, but this would not necessarily make them affordable. It calls for increasing price “transparency” (perhaps so that you can know exactly how badly the system is screwing you). It will require health insurance companies to make public both how much of your healthcare dollar actually goes to your healthcare (as opposed to their profit and overhead) and how often they deny paying for care—as if this will somehow make them “accountable.”

And as with most incremental ideas, including, by the way, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Trump’s plan won’t fix the two huge failures of our current health insurance system: we fail to make sure everyone has health care (universal coverage) and we fail to make it affordable, either for most Americans or for the country itself (our costs per person are much higher than any other advanced nation, and we get less for what we spend).

Nothing in Trump’s sparse proposals will make our failed health insurance system either universal or affordable.

Here’s some context: KFF, the healthcare think tank, reported at the start of the presidential campaign in 2024 that some three-quarters of Americans worried that they would not be able to afford to pay their medical bills if they got sick.1 As a result, unaffordable healthcare costs were a close second only to inflation of the issues most voters wanted the candidates to talk about. Did you hear much from either side about how they would make the system both affordable and universal? Me neither.

Currently, “affordability” is word #1 as the midterm campaigns get going—worrisome increases in the costs for housing, food, daycare, and (topping the list) healthcare2 are everyday kitchen table issues for many if not most American households. Inflation may be down, but wages have not kept up.3

As usual, the voters are both blaming the politicians and hoping that they will fix it.

And being the ones in charge right now, that’s a real problem for Republicans with the 2026 midterms this Fall.

Their healthcare brand, never strong, has taken a big hit in the last year: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is now law, and it gutted healthcare for some of American’s neediest who are on health insurance for the poor, Medicaid. There is widespread concern that as a result, many hospitals will go bankrupt—and the resulting closures will not just affect poor people. The GOP has spent more time and effort in trying to repeal Obamacare than they have in figuring out how to replace it—just look at Trump’s latest plan. And as a result of Republicans’ ending federal subsidies to help people afford to pay for their Obamacare premiums, millions more will end up without insurance coverage. Not a good optic for the GOP.

The Republicans healthcare brand seems to be less concerned with the health and general welfare of the people and more with the profits of the various healthcare industries. Of course, we want prosperous healthcare industries, but when the current healthcare system is clearly working out more to the benefit of industry rather than people, the people have every right to question the motives of the politicians running for office.

And that goes for Democrats as well: it’s still a minority of Democrats in Congress who support real health insurance reform, Single Payer Medicare for All, which would provide everyone with affordable care. (Support from Washington Republicans for Single Payer is practically non existent.)

Recent elections seem to show that voters are getting fed up with politicians of either party who refuse to respond to their needs. This fall, I would expect the hammer to fall particularly heavy on Republicans…unless they can deliver real reform, especially on healthcare affordability.

Otherwise, it might be the GOP that is D.O.A. on election night.