Meet the Republican Healthcare Plan: Suffering, Bankruptcy and Death

by | Dec 13, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Photo by Stephen Andrews, Unsplash

Meet the Republican Healthcare Plan: Suffering, Bankruptcy and Death

by | Dec 13, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Photo by Stephen Andrews, Unsplash

Underlying Conservative opposition to universal healthcare is ultimately selfishness: the belief that they are forever living in scarcity, that someone else’s gain must automatically be their loss.

Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

Trump and the Republicans are furthering their dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, taking away desperately needed subsidies from tens of millions of Americans.

The long-anticipated, perennially delayed GOP healthcare plan, the one they’ve had fifteen years to provide as an alternative to Obamacare, seems to finally be confirmed:

That’s not unexpected, though, heartbreaking and infuriating nonetheless.

Every single day, I am left in awe of the cruelty Republican politicians have become afflicted with, and that their rank-and-file voters allow. Watching them fight to take life-saving care away from other human beings, when they applaud the exclusion of already sick people from coverage, when they rejoice over strangers being denied screenings or medication or surgery, I feel compelled to ask them:

What is wrong with your heart?

How have you lost the capacity for empathy?

If you’re a professed Christian, what is your understanding of your faith tradition that you oppose the healing of wounds?

The disastrous state of America’s healthcare should be a non-partisan emergency. This isn’t a political or a financial issue after all, it’s an ethical one. It has nothing to do with funding (because every other developed nation seems to have figured it out). This is about whether or not keeping people healthy or alive is a core value.

It’s a pass-fail test of human decency.

We can get into the weeds of costs, systemic issues, and logistical challenges all we want, but that’s avoiding the fundamental truth: that we are interdependent beings. As part of a national community, our destinies are tethered together. When someone is ill, when they lose the ability to work or care for themselves or for their families, when they default on loans and mortgages, when surgery costs bankrupt them, when they cannot get essential medications, when they die prematurely, we all suffer. The ripples of these crises touch all of us, emotionally, spiritually, tangibly, and yes, financially.

Political tribalism in America is fierce, coming from the very top of our government. Yet it’s impossible to fathom how Republican voters allow their party allegiances to supersede their love for their neighbors, let alone their own well-being.

It’s bedrock human being stuff to want other people to be well, and the terrors, after all, are universal:

  • The atomic bomb of grief that gets dropped on your family when you get the test results, and your planet is altered forever.
  • The abject terror that befalls you when someone you love is facing a literal fight for their continued existence, and all you want is for them to win it.
  • The swirling storm that rushes in and overwhelms you; a million questions about outcomes and treatments and percentages and nightmare scenarios.
  • The bottom immediately dropping out of your sense of peace and safety and normality when visited by a dire prognosis.
  • The feeling that everything is suddenly caving in, and at the very least, you hope you won’t lose everything you have trying to keep someone you love alive.

How can Republican leaders experience any of these devastating moments in their own lives, with their own bodies, with those most dear to them, and simply not be at all interested when another human being finds themselves there?

This is unfathomable to me.

Underlying Conservative opposition to universal healthcare is ultimately selfishness: the belief that they are forever living in scarcity, that someone else’s gain must automatically be their loss, that if another person receives, then they might be left with nothing.

The level of self-preservation is toxic, but worse than that, there is an insidious, twisted resentment of strangers at work here, one that doesn’t want someone else to “get away with something,” to cheat the system and pull one over on them (and you know, not die). This callousness is a national cancer that seems to be metastasizing, and we need to attend to it.

We should stop pretending that this is about making an unreasonable and unprecedented financial sacrifice for someone else. We all pay for roads for everyone, for education for everyone, for missiles for everyone. We can find a way to pay for medicine for everyone. That’s not what this is about.

Our shared humanity is at stake here, and you either care enough to defend it or you don’t.

Another human being not dying is either a priority for you or it’s not.

People being allowed to stay healthy and alive and with the people who love them is either a pressing issue or it isn’t.

If the latter in any of these cases is true, it is the symptom of a far more grave illness.

The American people need to remove Republican leaders if we have a prayer of surviving.

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.

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