MaddowBlog-Why Trump's pitiful new health care 'plan' is even worse than it appears [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The White House’s health care gambit isn’t just a sham, it also diverts the process from an actually helpful solution.

The important thing to remember about Trump’s new health care “plan” is that it’s not an actual health care plan.

It’s a hodgepodge of random conservative ideas, packaged together on a short website, which pushes meaningful solutions even further away. www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-01-16T14:14:18.302Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/why-trumps-pitiful-new-health-care-plan-is-even-worse-than-it-appears

After seeing the new proposal billed by the White House as “The Great Healthcare Plan,” it’s fair to say Trump and his team still haven’t delivered. The New York Times reported:

Under pressure to address affordability issues in the country, President Trump on Thursday released his long-awaited health care plan, urging Congress to pass measures that would codify steps his administration has already taken to try to lower drug costs and providing what a White House official called ‘broad direction’ to back health savings accounts.

The plan was short on specific details and left much of the direction for how to finalize it up to Congress. It amounted to a few paragraphs on a webpage.

To characterize the document the White House produced as a health care “plan” is overly generous. The entirety of the proposal — literally, from start to finish — is 386 words. For context, the blog post that you’re reading right now is roughly 650 words, and if your health care blueprint is quite a bit shorter than a blog post, then you don’t actually have a health care plan......

But there is nothing to pass. There is no bill. The plan, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.

Moreover, the White House document is little more than a hodgepodge of conservative ideas, packaged together on a short website. A Washington Post report noted, “The administration released no legislative text nor timeline for related congressional action. … Asked how the proposal would advance in Congress, administration officials said it was a ‘broad architecture’ intended to guide lawmakers on next steps.”

“Broad architecture” is a nice euphemism for “we couldn’t actually come up with anything more than vague goals.”

At the heart of the proposal was a demand for one significant change: The administration wants federal funds that are currently going to insurance companies to go instead to consumers — who in turn would give the money to insurance companies.

Why would that be better than the status quo? I honestly have no idea, and neither the president nor anyone on his team have made any effort to answer questions along those lines.