By Xenia Shih Bihon, California Health Care Foundation, February 24, 2020
Recent polling shows that health care continues to be top of mind for most Americans. A survey conducted by Politico and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (PDF) found that the vast majority of Americans rank lowering health care costs and prescription drug prices as their top domestic priorities for President Donald Trump and Congress. And, in a recent Gallup poll, Americans ranked health care as an extremely important issue, slightly edging out terrorism/national security, gun policy, and education.
While Americans support steps to strengthen the health care safety net, the Trump administration continues taking steps to weaken it. The president recently released a budget proposal with deep cuts to Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for people who can’t afford health care. Medicaid is also the nation’s largest public insurance program.
“Taken together with Medicaid changes recommended elsewhere in the budget, the proposal would strip about $1 trillion out of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies, the two pillars of the law’s expansion of insurance coverage,” Margot Sanger-Katz reported in the New York Times.
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