Quantifying health coverage losses under Trump

Between the years 2016 and 2019—the majority of President Donald Trump’s current term in office—the number of Americans without health insurance jumped by about 2.3 million, and that loss of health coverage led to at least 3,399 deaths and possibly as many as 25,180, a new analysis found.

In a November 3, 2020 Healthline article, John McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that the analysis accurately pinpoints how healthcare has suffered under the current administration.

McDonough, who was not involved in the study, worked on the development and passage of the Affordable Care Act while he was a senior adviser on national health reform to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. He noted that while the number of uninsured people declined for six years during the Obama administration, the number has only gone up during Trump’s time in office.

“We can connect this rise in uninsurance to policy decisions by the Trump administration, including the cessation of nearly all federal support for enrollment navigators and assisters, the reduction in the individual mandate penalty to zero, and the expansion of junk, short-term health insurance plans, among other interventions,” he said.

Read the Healthline article: In Trump’s First 3 Years, 2 Million Americans Lost Healthcare, Thousands Died Prematurely