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Who's going to pay for covering everybody, including the currently uninsured? "The government's going to pay for it," Trump said in a 2015 interview.
When asked what they like most about Trump, fervent supporters often say, “He says what he thinks.” Well, not always. Donald Trump has long supported government-run universal healthcare—well before he had to deal with a crazed Congressional GOP in his first term. The controlling Republicans repealed Obamacare dozens of times in the House of Representatives (repeal was blocked in the Senate)—without offering any alternative.
President Trump also denounced Obamacare in vitriolic expletives, but he offers no alternatives.
However, let’s look back at a time when Trump, before his first term, was not tongue-tied about Medicare for All.
In a little-noticed Washington Post article (May 5, 2017), headlined “Trump’s forbidden love: Single-payer health care,” Aaron Blake reports that “in his heart of hearts, [Trump] wants single-payer health care. Indeed, it seems to be his forbidden fruit.”
Blake goes back to 2000 when “he [Trump] advocated for it as both a potential Reform Party presidential candidate and in his book, “The America We Deserve,” to wit:
“We must have universal health care. Just imagine the improved quality of life for our society as a whole,” he wrote, adding: “The Canadian-style, single-payer system in which all payments for medical care are made to a single agency (as opposed to the large number of HMOs and insurance companies with their diverse rules, claim forms, and deductibles)…helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans…Just before the 2016 campaign, Trump appeared on David Letterman’s show and held up Scotland’s socialist system as the ideal.”
Then, in April 2017, a law professor argued in the New York Post that Trump should just go for it. Universal Healthcare would be great for the Republican Party, as it would challenge the Democrats’ claim that it is the compassionate party. Moreover, Trump’s supporters would actually like better, less costly healthcare.
“A friend of mine was in Scotland recently. He got very, very sick. They took him by ambulance and he was there for four days. He was really in trouble, and they released him and he said, ‘Where do I pay?’ And they said, ‘There’s no charge,’” Trump said. “Not only that, he said it was like great doctors, great care. I mean, we could have a great system in this country.”
Then, early in the 2016 campaign, he again praised the single-payer systems in Scotland and Canada—while also arguing that the United States needed to have a private system.
Asked on “Morning Joe” whether he supported single-payer, he said: “No, but it’s certainly something that in certain countries works. It actually works incredibly well in Scotland. Some people think it really works in Canada. But not here, I don’t think it would work as well here.”
He said two days later at a GOP debate: “As far as single-payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.”
Later on, Trump would repeatedly push for universal health care without specifically subscribing to the words “single-payer.”
“Everybody’s got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say,” Trump said in a September 2015 “60 Minutes” interview. “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
He added when asked who is going to pay for it: “The government’s gonna pay for it.”
[…]
Law professor F.H. Buckley argued in the New York Post last month that, in the face of defeat for the Republican health-care bill, Trump should just go for it. He argued that it would be a great thing for the Republican Party because it would eliminate Democrats’ claim to being the party of compassion and that Trump’s supporters would actually like it.
“Leave behind all the people who hated you, who curse when you succeed,” Buckley wrote. “Reach out to the people who voted for you. Challenge the Democrats by offering them what they’ve always said they wanted.”
Fast forward, and Buckley’s words are even more timely. In a few weeks, the Republicans have promised a vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies to 22 million Americans. The Grand Old Plutocrats are in a bind. If they reject these subsidies, they give the Democrats a huge and decisive winning campaign issue for the 2026 elections. If they accede and keep the prices from skyrocketing, they hand a victory to the Democrats in defiance of their past rejections of universal healthcare and look weak.
My sister Claire Nader suggests that this is a great opportunity for Trump’s sense of grandiosity. Knowing the Congressional Republicans’ bind and disarray, he can announce his single-payer universal health care—everybody in, nobody out—and cite how much more efficient such a system is in Scotland, Canada, Australia, and other countries.
Then Trump could tout the political advantages—sweeping aside all the media coverage coming about the loss of Medicaid coverage by tens of millions of Americans, including Trump voters. Gone would be the huge inflationary price increases, continued inscrutable bills, with their overcharges and fraud. Getting healthcare would be far less aggravating than today. Imagine no more giant health insurance companies with their denials of benefits, rip-offs, suffocating fine print, and prior authorization requirements that enrage physicians. All people would need to show is their Medicare card.
Trump could pluck H.R. 676 out of its obscurity (about 140 House Democrats signed on in 2019). He would get support for this bill from all the Democrats plus a hefty slice of GOP lawmakers, especially those running for re-election in 2026.
Trump is running out of distractions, and running out of the gas that kept his opponents in shock and awe. His polls are dropping. A recession is on the horizon. Inflation is here. His campaign promises are papier-mache. Government health insurance for all, with private (and some public, as with the VA) delivery of health care, comes close to the Canadian healthcare system that has worked for some 50 years, with better health outcomes.
As Claire wryly reminded me, Trump could become the Tommy Douglas of the United States. Douglas started Canadian Medicare in Saskatchewan in 1962 and is a hero in Canada.
Any Democrats holding back support for “Medicare for All” for fear of making Trump look good should think of the tens of millions of Americans who would feel good in so many ways, shorn of the anxiety, dread, and fear produced by our current broken, gouging healthcare system.
Trump’s past, present, and future will still give the Dems plenty of fodder for their loathing of the president’s policies and actions.
"Healthcare is becoming unsustainable under Trump," says one progressive politician running for US Senate. "Medicare for All would fix it."
The Trump administration came under fire on Sunday after sending Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, onto CNN's weekend news show to try to explain the Republican Party's elusive "solution" to the nation's healthcare crisis, a topic of much interest in recent weeks amid the longest government shutdown in the nation's history and growing fears over massive premium increases or loss of coverage for tens millions of Americans.
Asked during his appearance to explain what Republicans are considering to address the surging cost of healthcare, Oz talked about direct cash payments—something Trump himself has floated in recent weeks—as well as the idea of health saving accounts (or HSAs) which allow for personalized accounts set up to help pay for out-of-pocket medical needs, though not premium payments.
"If you had a check in the mail, you could buy the insurance you thought was best for you," Oz stated without explaining in what way that is different from people who received tax credits to purchase plans on the insurance exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act signed into law by former President Barack Obama.
Pushing such empty ideas while claiming them as viable solutions to soaring costs is partly what led critics like Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) this week to issue a public service announcement which stated flatly: "There is no Republican health care plan"—despite repeated claims to the contrary by GOP lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Dr Oz: "If you had a check in the mail, you could buy the insurance you thought was best for you" pic.twitter.com/rLoMdxhNPV
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 16, 2025
"Dr. Oz a few years ago was pitching Medicare Advantage for All—a scheme to put every person on the corporate health insurance plans he used to sell," said Andrew Perez, a politics editor for Zeteo, in response to the interview. "Now, he’s saying let’s take away insurance from millions and give them a few bucks for their health care instead. Insane."
In a blog post published last week, Nicole Rapfogel, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan policy think tank, explained why expanded HSAs, backed by the government or otherwise, would do little to nothing to improve access or lower costs for healthcare.
"Expanding HSAs has been a consistent theme, including in the House-passed version of the Republican megabill, though those provisions didn’t pass the Senate," explained Rapfogel. "But these policies are misguided and would do little to preserve access to affordable, comprehensive coverage."
She further explains that HSAs generally are better for wealthier people who have spare income to direct into such accounts, but of little use to poorer Americans who are already struggling to make ends meet each month. According to Rapfogel:
Most people do not have spare cash to set aside in HSAs; an estimated 4 in 10 people are in debt due to medical and dental bills.
People in lower tax brackets also benefit less from HSA tax savings. For example, a married couple making $800,000 saves 37 cents for each dollar contributed to an HSA, more than three times the 12 cents per dollar a married couple making $30,000 would save.
Further, HSAs do not promote efficient use of health care services. Research has shown that HSAs do not reduce health care spending, but rather shield more of that spending from taxes.
Given that understanding of the well-known limitations of HSAs or other avenues of government backstopping of private insurance, the level of bullshitting or straight up ignorance by Oz on Sunday morning, for many, was hard to take.
It's "pretty amazing," said economist Dean Baker on Sunday, "that Dr. Oz doesn't know that people choose their insurance under Obamacare, but no one ever said Dr. Oz knew anything about healthcare."
In an interview with Newsmax earlier this month, Johnson—who has argued that the GOP has reams of policy proposals on the topic—accused Democrats of having no reform solutions to the nation's healthcare crisis other than permanently fighting to save the status quo, including the "subsidizing the insurance companies" which is at the heart of the Affordable Care Act.
Taxpayer subsidies for private insurance giants "is not the solution," Johnson admitted at the time, though his party has refused to offer anything resembling a departure from the for-profit model which experts have demonstrated is the central flaw in the US healthcare system, one that spends more money per capita than any other developed nation but with the worst outcomes.
Meanwhile, as Republicans show in word and deed that they have nothing to offer people concerned about healthcare premiums in the nation's for-profit system, only a relative handful of Democratic Party members have matched renewed focus on the nation's long-simmering healthcare crisis with the popular solution that experts and economists have long favored: a single-payer system now commonly known as Medicare for All.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Senate Democrats, made the demand for Medicare for All a cornerpost of his two presidential campaigns, first in 2016 and then again in 2020. On the heals of those campaigns, which put the demand for a universal healthcare system before voters in a serious way for the first time in several generations, a growing number of lawmakers in Congress embraced the idea even as the party's establishment leadership treated the idea as toxic.
While a 2018 study by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst detailed why it is "easy to pay for something that costs less," people in the United States exposed to the arguments of Medicare for All over the last decade a majority have shown their desire for such a system in poll after poll after poll.
A single-payer system like Medicare for All would nullify the need for private, for-profit insurance plans and the billions of dollars in spending they waste each year in the form of profits, outrageous pay packages for executives, marketing budgets, and administrative inefficiences.
Despite its popularity and the opportunity it presents to show the working class that the Democratic Party is willing to turn its back on corporate interests by putting the healthcare needs of individuals and families first, the party leadership continues to hold back its support.
Lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who served as national co-chair to Sanders' second presidential run, has been arguing in recent weeks, amid the government shutdown fight, that Democrats should be "screaming" their support for universal healthcare "from the rooftops" in order to seize on a moment in which voters from across the political spectrum are more atuned than usual to the pervasive and fundamental failures of the for-profit system.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the US House, on Thursday reiterated her support for universal coverage by saying, "Instead of raising premiums for millions, how about we just get rid of them? Medicare for All!!"
As former Ohio state senator and progressive organizer Nina Turner said on Saturday, "This is a moment to mobilize for Medicare for All."
I went on Fox News to make the case for national health insurance & Medicare for All.
Democrats need to be screaming this from the rooftops. pic.twitter.com/eq9VO0pAxw
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) November 15, 2025
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, another former Sanders surrogate now running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan's US Senate race, has been another outspoken champion of Medicare for All in recent weeks.
"While MAGA slowly suffocates our healthcare system, we’re watching corporate health insurance choose profits—and corporate Democrats capitulating," El-Sayed said last week, expressing frustration over how the shutdown fight came to end. "Who suffers? The rest of us. It’s time for a healthcare system that doesn’t leave our insurance in the hands of big corporations—but guarantees health insurance for all of us."
Following Dr. Oz's remarks on Sunday, El-Sayed rebuked the top cabinet official as emblematic of the entire healthcare charade being perpetrated by the Republican Party under President Donald Trump.
"They think we're dumb," said El-Sayed of Oz's convoluted explanation of direct payments. "They know that no check they send will cover even a month of the healthcare Trump bump we can’t afford—but they think we’re not smart enough to know the difference. Healthcare is becoming unsustainable under Trump. Medicare for All would fix it."
In Maine on Sunday, another Democratic candidate running for the US Senate, Graham Platner, also championed the solution of Medicare for All.
After watching Oz's peformance on CNN, Tyler Evans, creative director who works for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) declared in a social media post: "If we had Medicare for All, you could simply go to the doctor."
The only people in America whose health care isn’t about to get much worse are billionaires, who can hop into their private helicopters to see their private doctors. The rest of us? It's time for us to fight like hell.
Republicans are obsessed with taking your health care away. This spring, they cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, all to give massive tax handouts to billionaires. For the last month and a half they shut down the government rather than prevent premiums from doubling on average for 24 million people in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. And they “won.”
The number of uninsured Americans is about to skyrocket, which is exactly what Republicans want. It is what they fight for every day; to steal your health care.
These cuts are devastating for seniors, who rely on Medicaid to pay for nursing homes and other long-term care (which typically isn’t covered by Medicare). They are also disastrous for Americans aged 50-64, many of whom are in the ACA marketplaces and will have the largest premium increases. Many will have no choice but to drop their health insurance and pray they don’t get too sick before they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare—literally gambling with their lives.
Even if you’re not on Medicaid or the ACA, the Republican cuts will make your health care worse. Without the Medicaid dollars they need to survive, hospitals and nursing homes across the country are already closing their doors. Far more will close in the next few years, with rural areas and inner cities hit hardest.
Republicans are ideologically committed to destroying health care at the behest of their billionaire donors.
The hospitals that remain open will have to cut staff due to lower revenue—even as their ERs are flooded with newly uninsured patients who have nowhere else to go. That means if you get hit by a car, you’ll likely have to go to a hospital further away and wait longer to see a doctor. All thanks to Republicans.
The only people in America whose health care isn’t about to get much worse are billionaires, who can hop into their private helicopters to see their private doctors.
Democrats are demanding that Republicans back off their draconian health care cuts. That’s what the just-concluded government shutdown was all about—Democrats refusing to vote for a budget that doesn’t fix the coming health care apocalypse.
Some Democrats thought that Republicans would come to the negotiating table and figure out a health care fix, if only out of political self-interest. But Republicans are ideologically committed to destroying health care at the behest of their billionaire donors.
House Republican Leader Mike Johnson is refusing to bring an extension of the ACA subsidies, which would prevent premiums from skyrocketing, up for a vote.
This refusal is why House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has put forward a discharge petition to obtain a three-year extension of the ACA subsidies. If the petition gets 218 signers, it forces a floor vote which also needs 218 to pass. There are 214 Democrats in the House.
Republicans are betting that by dividing Americans against each other, they can duck the blame for the health care apocalypse they created. Let’s prove them wrong.
That means we need only FOUR Republicans to cross the aisle and we can get the subsidies to pass the House, putting pressure on the Senate.
It comes down to these 25 Republicans, who are in extremely tight races and whose constituents are getting hammered by spiking premiums and disastrous Medicaid cuts:
Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06)
Kevin Kiley (CA-03)
David Valadao (CA-22)
Darrell Issa (CA-48)
Gabe Evans (CO-08)
Cory Mills (FL-07)
María Elvira Salazar (FL-27)
Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01)
Zach Nunn (IA-03)
Bill Huizenga (MI-04)
Tom Barrett (MI-07)
Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11)
Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07)
Mike Lawler (NY-17)
Mike Turner (OH-10)
Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01)
Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07)
Rob Bresnahan (PA-08)
Scott Perry (PA-10)
Andy Ogles (TN-05)
Monica De La Cruz (TX-15)
Rob Wittman (VA-01)
Jen Kiggans (VA-02)
Bryan Steil (WI-01)
Derrick Van Orden (WI-03)
Republicans are betting that by dividing Americans against each other, they can duck the blame for the health care apocalypse they created. Let’s prove them wrong. That starts with flooding the phone lines of these Republicans and protesting outside their offices, to demand they save our health care.