I’m a RN and did not know the infertility rates in military personnel are so much higher than the general population. I’ve watched women’s reproductive rights be stripped away for decades. The IVF cuts make no sense other than shifting money and medical care to the rich. Thank you for this piece and all the great information.
Liked, restacked & shared to Bluesky (as always). I am grateful I live in the UK - where my healthcare is free at point of use (I paid my fair share of taxes in the past). Were it not so, I would doubtless be dead years ago (or living under a bridge)! I have undergone at least 5 MRI scans, ultrasound scans, biopsies, 3 endoscopies, surgery, multiple dental surgeries etc. The NHS may be slow & creaky, but it works. I have relatives & friends in the US, and I do worry about them...
Medicare is also going up. My SS monthly payment has decreased by $400 because of Medicare increases. Plus to keep my drug costs down I had to choose the only Medicare advantage plan that did so which means I must now pay a premium for that.
The increase for my husband and me is $641/mo. We are appealing but not holding my breath. We have kept Medicare original. Our health care system needs to collapse but so many people are being hurt as it happens.😢
To use the analogy of putting a frog in water and warming it slowly; this January the change might be abrupt enough to make the frog jump. But winter is an unfavorable time for protests so anything can happen, Meanwhile, I am mostly OK because I use the VA, but I have no illusions: its turn will come. They've already had some layoffs, and service seems a bit slower, but not by much. It helps that I have no immediate pressing health concerns.
Another terrific, fact based article enhanced by your personal knowledge and experience with some of these people. Your insights are always worth spending time reading your work. Thank you!!
Wow Olivia - this is a great article! What I have never been able to get my head around is that this Republican health care plan was outlined in Project 2025, which was made public in April of 2023. That was over a year and a half BEFORE the 2024 election. If Americans had listened to the truthful news channels and listened to democrat leaders, they would have known all of this before they voted. It is the pure ignorance and apathy of the 78 million voters who elected the mango Mussolini, and now they and the collaterally damaged Dems are paying for it!
My experience has been, with a major cancer treatment in ‘05 and employer insurance, I couldn’t easily switch jobs to get up another rung or switch to a neighboring “taller ladder”.
I had to quit that job in 09. I became self employed. My insurance went to $1200/month and kept going up to $2000/month until the ACA came in with the subsidies.
Health insurance was unaffordable until the ACA, and the Health Industrial Complex kept me in a less than stellar job.
This is a crisis of affordability, a self inflicted wound, not increasing costs of service, but just wait— that will come.
I’m sure my Medicare costs will be a third tier of effect.
Devastating. I’ve been blessed to have excellent health care at an affordable price with significant health challenges for myself and daughter along the way. One of the perks working for an affluent county library system in the mid Atlantic. I don’t see how people can manage without the level I have. We all deserve equal care and coverage.
Nope. They're delivering on their Christian White ethno-state. The essential brutality to brown people is being meted out daily. Dozens of unknown people are being murdered in the ocean with state-of-the-art weapons. Their rube base has nothing to complain about.
You nailed it, George. I grew up in the south, and, when I was a kid many years ago, the Republican party was almost nonexistant, at least in the Confederate states. Why? Because it was the party of Lincoln, who had freed the slaves. The only competition for public office was among Democrats, and the competition consisted of who could yell the N-word loudest. Then, along came LBJ and passage of the Civil Rights Bill, the Dixiecrats, and conversion of nearly every Confederate Democrat to the Republican party. The Republican party happily accepted them and their prejudice as well. What been Democrat was now Republican. Although they cloaked it in euphemisms, prejudice and preservation of the white ethno state was always on their agenda. They didn't dominate, but they were always competitive. Then, they got the greatest gift of all, Donald J. Thump, an actor and bigot who posed as a successful business man. Subtleness and euphemisms were words not in his dictionary. The gloves were off. The Civil War was on again. MAGA people are so blind with prejudice that they have no idea what Trump is doing to them. As Olivia points out, they will soon know the consequences of their blind obedience to the man who tells them what they want to hear.
Correctomundo. The death-for-cause rate during the peak of Covid was 2x in rural over urban counties country-wide. They didn't care. They still screamed about their 'raaahhhhts' for having to wear a mask in Walmart. Their children are dying of measles and floods... all preventable.
They will not, and cannot, turn on their core identity: worshipping the Great Orange Slug. This is a mental condition that is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This analysis treats the health-care shock as a convergence of policy failures hitting at once, but it also reflects how cost shifting has been structurally embedded across parallel systems. When subsidies expire automatically, eligibility depends on procedural compliance, and employer plans internalize rising costs without wage adjustment, the burden predictably migrates to households regardless of intent. These pressures feel sudden only because they surface simultaneously, but they emerge from design choices that distribute fiscal stress downward while insulating decision-makers from immediate consequence. What January reveals is less a new crisis than the exposure of how risk has been quietly reassigned.
Make Republicans own 100% of these price increases.
Yes. Really need solid and consistent messaging that reaches outside of echo chambers to remind voters late next year that this is what they did...
Amen👏🏼 more depressing strategies
Is there a rationale to the GOP measures? To me it looks like they want to keep us poor, sick and uneducated.
It looks that way to me too. I can't find a rationale, so I assume it's their twisted desire for power. What else do they gain?
Their model is Russia - oligarchs and serfs.
Precisely.
I’m a RN and did not know the infertility rates in military personnel are so much higher than the general population. I’ve watched women’s reproductive rights be stripped away for decades. The IVF cuts make no sense other than shifting money and medical care to the rich. Thank you for this piece and all the great information.
Hi Gretchen, I appreciate you taking the time to read it.
You are the best Olivia ! Honest and accurate! 💙
Liked, restacked & shared to Bluesky (as always). I am grateful I live in the UK - where my healthcare is free at point of use (I paid my fair share of taxes in the past). Were it not so, I would doubtless be dead years ago (or living under a bridge)! I have undergone at least 5 MRI scans, ultrasound scans, biopsies, 3 endoscopies, surgery, multiple dental surgeries etc. The NHS may be slow & creaky, but it works. I have relatives & friends in the US, and I do worry about them...
Medicare is also going up. My SS monthly payment has decreased by $400 because of Medicare increases. Plus to keep my drug costs down I had to choose the only Medicare advantage plan that did so which means I must now pay a premium for that.
The increase for my husband and me is $641/mo. We are appealing but not holding my breath. We have kept Medicare original. Our health care system needs to collapse but so many people are being hurt as it happens.😢
Hate seeing people get hurt by all of this. I know it's very hard right now.
Universal healthcare would end up being so much more rational - better for everyone. Why they gotta be so MEAN, and so BACKWARD????
To use the analogy of putting a frog in water and warming it slowly; this January the change might be abrupt enough to make the frog jump. But winter is an unfavorable time for protests so anything can happen, Meanwhile, I am mostly OK because I use the VA, but I have no illusions: its turn will come. They've already had some layoffs, and service seems a bit slower, but not by much. It helps that I have no immediate pressing health concerns.
Another terrific, fact based article enhanced by your personal knowledge and experience with some of these people. Your insights are always worth spending time reading your work. Thank you!!
Wow Olivia - this is a great article! What I have never been able to get my head around is that this Republican health care plan was outlined in Project 2025, which was made public in April of 2023. That was over a year and a half BEFORE the 2024 election. If Americans had listened to the truthful news channels and listened to democrat leaders, they would have known all of this before they voted. It is the pure ignorance and apathy of the 78 million voters who elected the mango Mussolini, and now they and the collaterally damaged Dems are paying for it!
My experience has been, with a major cancer treatment in ‘05 and employer insurance, I couldn’t easily switch jobs to get up another rung or switch to a neighboring “taller ladder”.
I had to quit that job in 09. I became self employed. My insurance went to $1200/month and kept going up to $2000/month until the ACA came in with the subsidies.
Health insurance was unaffordable until the ACA, and the Health Industrial Complex kept me in a less than stellar job.
This is a crisis of affordability, a self inflicted wound, not increasing costs of service, but just wait— that will come.
I’m sure my Medicare costs will be a third tier of effect.
Devastating. I’ve been blessed to have excellent health care at an affordable price with significant health challenges for myself and daughter along the way. One of the perks working for an affluent county library system in the mid Atlantic. I don’t see how people can manage without the level I have. We all deserve equal care and coverage.
This will be the republican's death knell
Nope. They're delivering on their Christian White ethno-state. The essential brutality to brown people is being meted out daily. Dozens of unknown people are being murdered in the ocean with state-of-the-art weapons. Their rube base has nothing to complain about.
You nailed it, George. I grew up in the south, and, when I was a kid many years ago, the Republican party was almost nonexistant, at least in the Confederate states. Why? Because it was the party of Lincoln, who had freed the slaves. The only competition for public office was among Democrats, and the competition consisted of who could yell the N-word loudest. Then, along came LBJ and passage of the Civil Rights Bill, the Dixiecrats, and conversion of nearly every Confederate Democrat to the Republican party. The Republican party happily accepted them and their prejudice as well. What been Democrat was now Republican. Although they cloaked it in euphemisms, prejudice and preservation of the white ethno state was always on their agenda. They didn't dominate, but they were always competitive. Then, they got the greatest gift of all, Donald J. Thump, an actor and bigot who posed as a successful business man. Subtleness and euphemisms were words not in his dictionary. The gloves were off. The Civil War was on again. MAGA people are so blind with prejudice that they have no idea what Trump is doing to them. As Olivia points out, they will soon know the consequences of their blind obedience to the man who tells them what they want to hear.
George, the ting is they are also killing their own base, especially in rural areas, no?
Correctomundo. The death-for-cause rate during the peak of Covid was 2x in rural over urban counties country-wide. They didn't care. They still screamed about their 'raaahhhhts' for having to wear a mask in Walmart. Their children are dying of measles and floods... all preventable.
They will not, and cannot, turn on their core identity: worshipping the Great Orange Slug. This is a mental condition that is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Great talking with you - keep up the fight
Well, their voters are going to have a really expensive wake up call in a few months.
They'll get the call. I'm skeptical many will wake up.
This analysis treats the health-care shock as a convergence of policy failures hitting at once, but it also reflects how cost shifting has been structurally embedded across parallel systems. When subsidies expire automatically, eligibility depends on procedural compliance, and employer plans internalize rising costs without wage adjustment, the burden predictably migrates to households regardless of intent. These pressures feel sudden only because they surface simultaneously, but they emerge from design choices that distribute fiscal stress downward while insulating decision-makers from immediate consequence. What January reveals is less a new crisis than the exposure of how risk has been quietly reassigned.
All of us should never forget them. And we never should!
Future looking pretty dim. Thanks Ftrump.