Goozner: Trump Presidency Could Slash Coverage as Harris Pushes Medicare Expansion

Health columnist and former editor of Modern Healthcare Merrill Goozner has sounded the alarm about what might happen to the U.S. health system if Donald Trump gets to the White House. Indeed he writes in GoozNews, his Substack column, “The stakes for health care: The fate of America’s inadequate, unaffordable and unequal health care system is on the ballot. Harris gives us a chance to make it better. A Trump victory guarantees something worse.” I have known Goozner for a long time, and can say he knows the system very well. His worries are well-founded, and those who are concerned about losing their health care or finding it severely cut in a Trump presidency should read his column. 

Despite the significant gains in insurance coverage made by the Affordable Care Act in the last 11 years, the American health care system is still in need of serious repair.

“Most people don’t know or are dimly aware” that Harris has proposed the most significant Medicare expansion since adding a prescription drug benefit in 2003,” Goozner wrote. Her plan “would be wildly popular if more people knew about it.”

A second Trump presidency “will result in millions of people losing their health insurance coverage or seeing their benefits sharply reduced,” he wrote.

Goozner also promoted Harris’ plan to add a home-care benefit to Medicare which would offer financing for in-home aides to help infirm and elderly family members struggling to stay out of nursing homes. He notes that 75% of U.S. adults support a program to help pay for long-term care, and cites the programs other countries such as Japan have had for some time now. In 1993 I was in Japan as a Fulbright scholar studying the Japanese health system, and was amazed at the long-term care program the country already had enacted. Thirty-one years later, the U.S. is still not even talking about creating such a program although Goozner reports that 75% of adults in the U.S. support that effort.

Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy plan designed to guide a second Trump presidency, calls for Medicare Advantage for all, which would take away the more comprehensive coverage of traditional Medicare and a supplement coverage that millions of Americans still have and want. 

As I wrote earlier this year, “The seeds of Medicare’s destruction are in the air. The program as it was set out in 1965 has kept millions of Americans out of medical poverty for over 50 years, but may well become something else – a privatized health care system for the oldest citizens whose medical care will depend on the profit goals of a handful of private insurers.”