Politics

Eight years later, the GOP — the party that has spent decades trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare — is trying a different approach: Destroying the program by increments, one painful piece at a time.

• They ended the individual mandate, which would have made everyone participate — and kept premiums lower while covering people who don’t realize that bad things can happen to them too.
• They hobbled the Medicaid expansion from the beginning, and more recently they cut that program drastically under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is conveniently set to take place after the 2026 midterms, revealing that they know just how unpopular and cruel those cuts will be.
• They made it more difficult to enroll, forcing people to manually sign up every year instead of being automatically enrolled.
• And now they are allowing the ACA subsidies to expire, hiking premiums to unaffordable levels for millions of people.

The GOP’s philosophy was perhaps best captured by Medicare and Medicaid head Dr. Mehmet Oz, who said Sunday on Fox News, “If you really want to drop the cost of health care in America, get healthier.”