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New GOP Strategy: Skyrocket the Cost of Health Insurance and Prescription Drugs

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House and Senate Republicans and the Trump campaign are looking to repeal parts of President Joe Biden’s highly-successful Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and President Barack Obama’s highly-successful Affordable Care Act (ACA), with a sharp focus on the provisions that protect access to health insurance and have lowered health care costs and prescription drug costs for millions of Americans – and will do so even more next year.

Republicans this week have been discussing plans to repeal the protections that require private insurance companies to provide the same coverage, and at the same cost, to people with pre-existing conditions as it does for those without them. They are also looking to repeal the hard-fought right the federal government now has to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, turned 14 this year. Some Americans, especially those who came of age after it was enacted, may not be aware that before the ACA, insurance companies could and often did deny coverage based on “pre-existing conditions.” ObamaCare made that practice illegal.

“GOP healthcare plans, per the last 24 hours,” reports DC journalist Todd Zwillich, include “repeal pre-existing conditions protections in private insurance,” and “repeal Medicare’s negotiating power for Rx drugs.”

U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) called the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that allow the federal government to negotiate prices for Medicare drugs, “the worst legislation I’ve ever witnessed in 10 years in Congress and 10 years in the state legislature.” He said he “absolutely” wants to repeal them, according to Axios. “No congressional Republicans asked by Axios argued for keeping the IRA drug pricing talks.”

READ MORE: ‘Huge Problem for Trump’: Joe Rogan Gushes Over Kamala Harris

“Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he ‘100%’ wants to repeal the negotiation provisions, while other drug pricing sections of the law would need to be evaluated based on whether they have ‘a positive impact on business.'”

Axios also reports that “multiple high-ranking Republicans told Axios they want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug price negotiations next year if they prevail in the elections.”

“This isn’t some wild accusation or scare tactic,” remarked Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. “Republicans are admitting they would side with Big Pharma and gut the Biden-Harris law that lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, if they win. They are literally, openly, for higher drug prices.”

During last week’s presidential debate Donald Trump admitted that after years of vowing to “repeal and replace” Obamacare and after numerous promises he would release his healthcare plan soon, often in “two weeks,” all he actually has are the “concepts of a plan.”

Trump’s running mate, U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) on Sunday revealed what some of those concepts are.

Journalist Brian Beutler highlighted Vance’s remarks on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” where the GOP vice-presidential nominee said, “we want to make sure everybody is covered. But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.”

Pointing to Vance’s interview (above), Beutler writes: “When Vance here says he wants to put the healthy and sick in different risk pools he’s saying he wants to make pre-existing conditions protections impossible. His claim to want to maintain them is a lie.”

READ MORE: ‘Megaphone for Hate’: Vance’s Slam of Dem ‘Rhetoric’ Backfires in ‘Streisand Effect’

“One of the ‘concepts’ of the Trump-Vance plan is to screw over people with pre-existing conditions, specifically,” he adds, pointing to his “Off Message” Substack. “Step one of the plan is to lie about it—say it covers pre-existing conditions. Step two is to kick out the regulatory tentpoles that make covering pre-existing conditions possible.”

Journalist Heather Parton Digby writes that Vance’s plan “would take us back to the time when I was denied health insurance because I had periodontal disease. (I’m not kidding.) When I finally found a health insurer who would cover me ( I was otherwise completely healthy) it cost well over a thousand dollars a month and it had a gigantic deductible. That’s the market we were living in if we didn’t have employer or government insurance. Vance wants to take us back to that and people really should know that.”

If Republicans are successful in eliminating protections, insurance companies could be able to determine what a pre-existing condition is, and whether they want to deny a policy to any individual who has a pre-existing condition, or to deny coverage for that condition and any related issues.

Up to 50 percent of all non-elderly Americans – up to 129 million Americans – have a pre-existing condition, according to the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“A medical illness or injury that you have before you start a new health care plan may be considered a pre-existing condition. Conditions like diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, and sleep apnea, may be examples of pre-existing health conditions. They tend to be chronic or long-term,” according to Cigna, a healthcare and insurance company. “The ACA made it illegal for health insurance companies to deny you medical coverage or raise rates due to a pre-existing condition.”

The list of what could be considered a pre-existing condition is long, but after the coronavirus pandemic, it has grown longer and encompasses more Americans: An estimated 43 million Americans have had long COVID, and about 17 million Americans currently do still.

Near the end of the Trump administration, in 2020, KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation published a report: “Mental Illnesses May Soon Be the Most Common Pre-Existing Conditions.”

Also in 2020, House Democrats published a massive 197-page report: “Shortchanged: How the Trump Administration’s Expansion of Junk Short-Term Health Insurance Plans is Putting Americans at Risk.” It concluded these plans “present a significant threat to the health and financial well-being of American families. STLDI plans include limited protection for both catastrophic medical costs and routine medical care, and it is unclear what kind of value consumers are getting for their premium dollars, other than a false sense of security.”

Democratic former U.S. Congressman and Obama State Dept. official Tom Malinowski weighed in earlier this week:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Remigration’: Trump Continues Attacks on Immigrants With New Vow of Forced Deportations

 

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Historian Warns Trump’s Military May Be Committing War Crimes

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June 11, 2026

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Historian and professor of strategic studies Phillips P. O’Brien is warning that President Donald Trump’s military may be committing war crimes, and doing so seems to be “official” U.S. policy.

“The USA seems to have deliberately and with foresight, committed a war crime as an act of policy,” O’Brien writes at his Substack newsletter. “If this is right, and all evidence seems to say it is, committing acts of terror is now an acceptable method of war in the judgement of the US government and, by extension, the American people.”

O’Brien points to the U.S. military’s strike on “two reservoirs and a water treatment facility in southern Iran,” cutting off water to 20,000 civilians in what OBrien says is 115-degree heat, similar to America’s Death Valley.

He explains that it likely was a deliberate attack because there are no military installations in the area, “and the destruction was precise.”

It is “hard to see this as a mistake,” he writes. “The target was too specialized, too localized and the effect seems calibrated.”

Asking, “Is It A War Crime?” O’Brien answers, “Without a doubt.”

The U.S. “has attacked, seemingly deliberately, a facility vital to the maintenance of human life that has no discernible military utility. So yes, it is a war crime.”

Making the act even more “perverse,” writes O’Brien, is that “this war crime was deliberately committed because Donald Trump is getting frustrated that the Iranian government is not doing what he wants them to do and that the Iranian military attacked a legitimate military target, a US Apache helicopter that was enforcing a blockade (an act of war remember) against Iran.”

O’Brien calls it “typical, Trump,/organized crime style behavior.”

Trump “attacks a small civilian facility as a threat and warning to Iran that he might go on and commit even greater war crimes if they do not do what he wants.”

Later, “while speaking to Fox News reporters, Trump went ahead and said he might start mass attacks on Iran’s bridges and electricity power generation.”

“He also tweeted out that if Iran did not do what he wants it to do, that it would have to “pay the price” of their defiance,” says O’Brien.

He concludes that a “historic war crime” was committed “because the President of the USA can think of nothing better to do.”

Image via Reuters

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Steve Schmidt: Shame Has Disappeared From Trump’s America — and That’s the Real Danger

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June 11, 2026

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Political strategist Steve Schmidt warns that in Donald Trump’s America, shame — “one of freedom’s guardians” — has vanished. Humiliation now reads as a “badge of honor.” Conscience has curdled into “inconvenience.” Schmidt argues the result is institutional erosion and real danger to society.

“There was a time in America when public disgrace meant something,” says Schmidt at The Warning. “A man caught lying to the public would resign. A politician caught in corruption would retreat from public life. A leader who dishonored his office would feel the sting of judgment from neighbors, colleagues, family members and strangers.”

Under Trump, the America where people “understood that character mattered” and that “a good name took a lifetime to build and a moment to lose” is gone, because what is essential, shame, has “disappeared.”

Schmidt says the disappearance of shame may be “the most consequential political development of the last quarter century.”

Shame, he explains, was a “warning light.” It was “society’s way of enforcing standards when laws couldn’t,” and it “reminded people where the boundaries were.”

Schmidt points directly to Trump’s actions.

“Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. He attempted to overturn an election. He incited a mob against the United States Congress. He has told thousands upon thousands of documented lies,” he writes. “None of it brought shame. None of it produced reflection. None of it inspired remorse.”

Scandals have now become fundraising appeals, disgrace has become “grievance.”

“The lesson was clear: the shameless man held power over the ashamed man because he no longer recognized limits.”

Schmidt points the finger at technology, and specifically, social media.

Public life has become “performance.”

“Attention became more valuable than respect,” Schmidt observes. “Fame became more valuable than honor. The ability to provoke became more valuable than the ability to inspire.”

He explains that in Trump’s America, someone can simultaneously be “condemned” by millions and “celebrated” by millions more.

“The result is a culture where shamelessness is often mistaken for strength,” he says, and warns about not just corruption, but “indifference” to it.

“The danger is the normalization of conduct that once would have shocked the conscience,” he explains.

Schmidt says that this may not be permanent. Societies and cultures can rebuild and recover — but that has to begin with honesty.

 

Image via Reuters 

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Johnson Scrambles to Defend Trump’s ‘I Love the Inflation’ Remark — Critics Don’t Buy It

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June 10, 2026

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was quick to defend President Donald Trump’s widely reported remarks following Wednesday’s sharp spike in inflation, which is now at a three-year high.

“I knew somebody was going to ask me that,” Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju. “It was totally out of context, you know what he was talking about.”

When pressed whether Trump’s remarks were what voters want to hear right now, Johnson insisted that the president “is laser-focused on the domestic economic situation.”

“He is working to bring down prices, he is going to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened,” Johnson insisted. “We have passed legislation, he has used executive orders to get the cost of living down. Everybody got their highest tax refunds they’ve had in their whole lives, they’re getting great paychecks, there’s all sorts of great economic indicators, but there’s still challenges — gas prices among them.”

“So, what he was saying is, it’s going to be great having that number and compare it to what comes next when we get these situations resolved — that’ll be a fun thing to consider and compare — that was the context,” said the Speaker.

Speaking about the inflation report, as CNBC reported, Trump had told reporters: “No, I love it, the numbers were great.”

“You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why?”

“Because as soon as this war is over, you know I can say it now … you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil.”

“Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now,” Trump said.

CNBC noted that Trump, “speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, also predicted that inflation is ‘going to come down like a rock’ after the United States’ war against Iran is over.”

Critics blasted Speaker Johnson.

“Trump meant what he said and if people are taking things outta context maybe trump should speak English,” said one social media user.

Another called Johnson a “Trump apologist.”

A third remarked, “Aaaand, right on cue, here’s Mike Johnson, denying Trump said and meant what we all heard him say.”

Image via Reuters

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