The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) now provides access to healthcare for more than 45 million Americans, who could not otherwise afford coverage.        

The Act:

• Eliminates the “pre-existing condition” excuse insurance companies had used to deny coverage to those who most needed it.
• Provides a range of no-cost preventive services.
• Allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance up to age 26.
• Expands the Medicaid program that insures lower-income people access to health insurance markets offering subsidized plans.

Yet since it won Congressional passage in 2010, Republicans have made 50-70 attempts to repeal, modify, or otherwise weaken the Act.

As a Presidential candidate and President, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that he wants to replace it. But he’s never offered a credible substitute.

On September 10, 2024, in his only Presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, moderator Linsey Davis, of ABC News, asked him: “So tonight, nine years after you first started running, do you have a plan and can you tell us what it is?”

Trump’s reply: “I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now.” 

On July 4, a re-elected Trump, backed by a Republican House and Senate, signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. Its purpose: Significantly cut federal health programs to pay for tax reductions for billionaires.

The law primarily impacts Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and is projected to cause millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage. The bill includes the largest cuts in Medicaid’s history, reducing funding by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.

Democrats refused to support a temporary spending bill to fund the government unless Republicans reversed cuts to Medicaid and prevented health insurance premiums from rising at the end of the year. 

Trump—and Congressional Republicans—refused. They also falsely claimed that Democrats wanted to give health coverage to illegal aliens.

So the Federal Government shut down on October 1. The shutdown continues into its 36th day—with no end in sight.

Why have Republicans relentlessly tried to end healthcare for the poor? Here are the publicized reasons:

• Millions of Right-wingers hate the Federal Government and openly call for its overthrow. They vividly proved this on January 6, 2021 when they tried to illegally retain Donald Trump as President. They hoped to prevent the selection of Joe Biden as the legitimately-elected President of the United States by storming the Capitol Building.
• Racism forms a major component of the GOP’s appeal to older, white, Right-wing voters. So having the name of the first black President unofficially stamped on the Act (“Obamacare”) serves as a constant spur to their racist hatred.

Barack Obama

• Obama’s promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” The promise backfired because the law stated that those who already had medical insurance could keep their plans—so long as those plans met the requirements of the new healthcare law. If their plans didn’t meet those requirements, they would have to obtain coverage that did. 

Now for the most important—and unpublicized—reason.

Like so much else in the Republican agenda, it is rooted in the goals and methods of the Third Reich.

On June 22, 1941, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler sent three million soldiers smashing into the Soviet Union. During the first six months—June to December, 1941—German armies lured huge Soviet forces into gigantic “cauldron battles,” surrounding and exterminating them. 

An estimated 5.7 million Russians became prisoners of the Wehrmacht. The Germans found themselves surprised and overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of them. But their mandate demanded that they keep marching ever forward.

So they simply imprisoned their captives behind barbed wire and wasted no food or medical care on them. Between starvation, illness and the brutal Russian cold, at least 3.5 million POWs died in custody.

Soviet POW’s

Republicans have learned a valuable lesson from this: If you simply deprive those you detest of food, clothing, shelter—and medical care—you don’t need gas chambers or firing squads. Or even rigged vote-counts. 

No better proof of this could be given than the lying announcement made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on October 27:

“Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01.”  

This is a lie. Trump is holding back access to a contingency fund of $5 to $6 billion for the SNAP program. The reason: To pressure Democrats into agreeing to gut healthcare programs for the poor.

SNAP provides food assistance to more than 42 million Americans with low or no income.

For Trump, Democrats can choose to provide the poor with food—or medical care.

The official Republican lie continued:  

“We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

Most Americans—owing to naivety or historical ignorance—cannot accept that their Right-wing politicians can be as evil as those in other nations.

But they can—and are.

Those who depend on the government to provide access to food or medical care had better learn this truth quickly.