Yesterday, the US Senate passed Donald Trump’s big, ugly spending bill with a vote of 50-51. JD Vance broke the tie, because elections have consequences and people apparently didn’t like the way Kamala Harris laughed. This bill is a complete catastrophe in a million different ways. Republicans have also found a way to gut the Affordable Care Act, in a “death by a thousand paper cuts” sort of way:
The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration spending plan would wipe out many of the strides made by the Affordable Care Act in reducing the number of uninsured Americans, resulting in at least 17 million Americans losing their health coverage, according to nonpartisan estimates and experts.
The bill, which narrowly passed the Senate on Tuesday and now heads back to the House, would effectively accomplish what Republicans have long failed to do: unwind many of the key components of the ACA, President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, which dramatically increased the number of Americans with access to health insurance.
To start, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate version of the bill would result in 11.8 million more uninsured in 2034, mostly because of Medicaid cuts, compared with 10.9 million if the House version became law.
In addition, both versions of the bill would allow pandemic-era enhanced subsidies for health insurance through ACA marketplaces to expire at the end of the year, sharply raising out-of-pocket costs for millions of Americans. The CBO estimates that 4.2 million people would lose insurance as a result. An additional 1 million are likely to become uninsured because of a combination of other Trump administration cuts and the Republican legislation, according to the CBO.
The bill also includes other, less-noticed changes that over several years would make it harder for states to maintain the ACA’s Medicaid expansion at existing levels, which currently cover some 20 million Americans, according to KFF, a health policy research organization.
“This bill — if passed, and if the enhanced subsidies expire — will be a very effective undermining of the vision of the Affordable Care Act to move the United States to a country where universal coverage is in sight,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “This was the 100-year fight to get to the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”
To be fair, Republican governors are already on a years-long project to dismantle the ACA at the state level, at least that’s true of Virginia’s current governor. Additionally, Trump’s war against schools, education and children continues unabated – in the last 24 hours, the Trump administration decided to withhold $7 billion in federal funding for after-school and summer programs.
In addition to all of that, Florida is now creating shipping-container concentration camps for immigrants. They’re calling it “Alligator Alcatraz.” They have hate-crime merch.
It’s costing taxpayers $450/M annually & Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp is already flooding. Imagine a hurricane. People are going to die.
There’s always enough money to hurt folks, but when it comes to public transit, low-income housing, schools, or public healthcare, “Sorry, we’re broke.”
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) July 2, 2025 at 6:22 AM
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
