Healthcare

DEMOCRATIC PARTY POSITION:
All Americans deserve access to sound and comprehensive health care, including vaccinations, preventive care, dental, mental health, and childcare to enhance their opportunity to live a full life with needed medical services at a reasonable and affordable cost throughout their life stages. These benefits are provided by Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act plans. All these programs were proposed and enacted by Democratic Party presidential administrations during the last seventy years. The last was ACA, also known as Obamacare, which was enacted in 2010. 

Medicare is now a key and very successful component of the American social and healthcare system and safety net. As of 2026, it covered 69.7 million people, 89.9 percent of them aged 65 and older. Medicare is partially self-financed by current beneficiaries through premiums and by future beneficiaries through payroll taxes. Payroll taxes and premiums together cover about half of the program’s cost. Funding for Medicare, depending on which part, comes from various sources.

Medicare enrollment in Collier County is 119,991 (28% of the population) in 2026. Medicare enrollment in Florida, as of the beginning of 2026, stood at over 5 million, that’s nearly 22% of the state’s total population, compared with about 19% of the United States population enrolled in Medicare.

• REPUBLICANS IN FLORIDA:
  Republicans favor sunsetting of these popular social programs, including ending the requirement for private and public health insurance programs to provide coverage for pre-existing health conditions. They reason that the cost of healthcare, as well as the achievement of retirement benefits, are the responsibility of each individual and are costs that: 1) cannot be controlled by the government, 2) should not be borne by the rest of society through additional special taxes and 3) should not be the ultimate responsibility of government purses and taxpayers as they produce a huge public burden.

The federal legislation known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025” (OBBBA), driven by Trump and Republican legislators, and enacted on July 4, 2025, brought significant adverse implications for Florida’s Medicaid program and its low income policy holders and insured. These included an estimated potential loss of billions in federal funds over the next decade. While the law contains large tax cuts to high-income households, corporations, and wealthy investors,  its funding structure forces major cuts to Medicaid, which state analysts expect to reduce federal support for Florida by approximately $3.8 billion over several years.

Republicans also aimed and succeeded in 2025 in ending enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium subsidies after 2025 by allowing them to sunset as scheduled, rather than extend them. These actions were justified by them as reducing federal spending while simultaneously granting sizable tax cuts to high-income earners and corporations. Their strategy included opposing the extension of American Rescue Plan (ARP) tax credits and proposing alternatives like: 1) health savings accounts (HSAs) and 2) lowering costs for everyone, rather than providing subsidies. The final enacted law did not include these provisions in any meaningful manner. This failure by Republicans, again brought significant financial hardship and loss of access to healthcare to many lower income families and hard working Americans struggling with financial affordability issues.

The Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund which pays for Medicare beneficiaries’ hospital bills and other services, is projected to become insolvent in 2028. Medicare spending is a major driver of long-term federal spending and is projected to rise from 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in fiscal year 2021 to about 6 percent in fiscal year 2052 due to the retirement of the baby-boom generation (those born between 1944 and 1964), longer life expectancies, and rapidly increasing per capita healthcare costs that are growing faster than the economy.

STAND WITH US to protect your healthcare and social safety nets!

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