He Missed It By This Much
Trump nearly described the case for single payer healthcare, then proposed a $2,000 plan that keeps insurers in charge and costs more than the ACA.
NOTE: This was two separate pieces and I combined them because they were too short individually and were within the same thought thread. So, if you’re reading this and it feels like an abrupt change has happened, you are correct. I’ve included the graphics created for each.
Trump has always hated the ACA. Don’t get me wrong, Trump doesn’t give a drippy shit about Health Care. However, He HATES Obama and so it is only natural that a petulant fuck like Trump would also hate anything that Obama did, especially if we liked it. So, he hates Obama Care, or, as it is correctly referred to, The Affordable Care Act or the ACA. He’s been trying to kill it for as long as he’s been a republican which is about a year longer than he’s been on the political stage. (For the record, he decide to be a republican the night that Seth Meyers and Obama made fun of him at the correspondent’s dinner… where they pissed him off so much he ran for president. Thanks, guys.)
But just recently, in a rant about health care reform, he almost got to where we have all been hoping it might go. He was speaking about how he hated the idea of giving the money to the insurance companies (they must not have bribed him enough). He mentioned how we’d be paying for profit to the insurance companies from tax payer dollars (you know deep down he doesn’t give a fuck about that or them and if he feels anything at all about insurance companies it’s because he has to insure loans and buildings, not because of healthcare). But his rant was almost there. The insurance companies are raking in billions of dollars every year and providing less and less in terms of care and positive outcomes. We feel the same way. We go a bit further and state that the health insurance companies are not there to provide care but to remove money from our bank accounts as well as to take a giant scoop of federal tax dollars.
Trump’s “frame work of a plan” would cut out the insurance companies by giving the money directly to the people. Sadly, that was the whole plan and it would never actually provide healthcare and it would be more expensive. He never made the next leap. He never got to Single Payer. Trump doesn’t want to give the money to insurance companies, right. Well, the way to do that effectively is single payer.
He missed it by this much.
The vast majority of the American electorate wants single payer. Most of us also recognize that there needs to be the option to maintain your old insurance for those who are convinced that that system offers them more… and because if they feel like we are forcing them to do it, they’ll never accept it. It won’t matter in the long run because five years down the road, most of them will opt in for Single Payer.
There are lots of reasons to choose single payer and I’ve covered that before. I probably will again but not here. This is more about Trump. But I definitely think that if Trump created an actual single payer healthcare system for the US and delivered the republicans, his legacy would change overnight. Epstein and the volumes of other shit would never get un stuck from him but at the very least, we could say, “Well, He gave us Single Payer.”
No doubt the plan would be flawed and filled with land mines because… well, Trump, but it would be a move in the right direction and we could fix it over time after he’s dead and gone.
Branding Bust
The so called ‘King of Branding’, Donald Jennifer Trump, while in the midst of complaining about the insurance companies, released the very few details of his “Healthcare plan”. The first and most underwhelming part of it was the name…
The Great Healthcare Plan.
Plunk. No panache. No zing. No thought. Like he just made it up when Kaitlin Collins was asking him an uncomfortable question.
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The utter banality of it reminds me of the Piranha Brothers sketch from Monty Python where the brother’s first criminal plan was called “the Operation” and when that failed, the new plan was called, the Other Operation and when that one failed it was called the Other Other Operation.
We’ve been waiting for a Trump Healthcare plan for a decade. Shortly after he said “great people on both sides” he started yapping about how Obama Care was going to kill us all and destroy the country, yad yada yada. He was going to deliver to us a healthcare plan that was so much better than Obama Care and he would announce it in two weeks. He has two weeks’ed us through a decade of crap and he was still two weeks’ing us until very recently when his prospects were so bad over Epstein that he had to come up with ANYTHING simply as a distraction. And he called it “the Great Healthcare Plan”…. not even TrumpMed, DonnyDoc, Patriot Health or what I’d call it…AmeriCare.
As stupid and lack luster as the name was, the plan was worse. It was, very simply, stupid.
Here’s the plan. Are you ready?
He’s going to give everybody $2,000 and they can buy their own coverage.
That’s the plan, the whole plan and nothing but the plan.
How will that work? First, the overall cost. Trump would be giving the $2K to about 110 million people. That’s $220 Billion dollars per year. The government currently puts about 90–110 billion a year into the ACA so right from the start Trump’s plan would cost roughly twice what the ACA costs (in fixed costs), except that now, the infrastructure of the ACA is gone and everybody has to do their own thing AND THE MONEY STILL ENDS UP IN THE HANDS OF THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY.
In ten years, that’s $2 Trillion plus inflation and it still ends up on the hands of the insurance companies. Well, that is if it even makes it to the insurance companies as intended. Who’s to say that every $2,000 check gets used to pay for insurance? Maybe a significant percentage of the people getting the money will use it to pay rent, food and gas. Maybe they use it to fix the car or the roof. At least with the ACA the government knows that they money is being used to purchase healthcare.
But who am I kidding. He was doing the old soft shoe trying to dance his way out of a quesiton he didn’t want to answer about Epstein and child rape. He’s a shitdrizzle and he always will be. He doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about healthcare, the citizens, or the insurance corporations. He cares about him. He’d care for a minute about something if you bribed him enough but in the long run, on this subject, he was blowing hot air and he’ll blow more as often and as much as is needed to make us pay more time on something other than Epstein and child raping. The noise keeps us occupied and him out of jail. He never meant that he’d actually do anything at all about healthcare. He can’t get it through congress but he doesn’t need to. It’s just a shiny thing that the press will pick up and show us and for a few minutes we’re not talking about Epstein.
Looks like we got two weeks’d again.
Originally published at http://tmotr.wordpress.com on February 20, 2026.
