Health Care Reporting Bias Misrepresents Loss of ACA Subsidies

By Dr. Anne Scheetz, March 30, 2026

The Common Dreams article “Millions of Americans Joining the Ranks of the Uninsured Thanks to “Trump-GOP Cuts in 2025” is based on research by KFF, formally Kaiser Family Foundation. 

Unfortunately, that report distorts the narrative about what’s wrong with the US health care system.  It describes Improved Medicare for All deceptively as "an expansion of the Medicare program to the entire US population. As millions of Americans know, Medicare as it currently exists is far from adequate to people's needs; and, as the author of the article cannot help but know, is not what Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) proposes. 

The article describes people who cannot pay the higher premiums for the Marketplace (ACA) plans now that subsidies have ended.  It describes a woman who has "missed the enrollment window;" people who must make sacrifices to pay for basic health care and who worry that they cannot afford emergency care.

Nowhere does the article specifically say that millions of Americans faced these same problems even with Marketplace subsidies and with expanded Medicaid.  The article does not point out that KFF did not ask people the questions that would have elicited this information.

Nowhere does the article explicitly say that  Improved Medicare for All laid out in the proposed Congressional legislation (H.R. 3960) would cover all residents of the US for all necessary care, under a single plan; would abolish all out-of-pocket costs including premiums; and would require enrollment only once in a lifetime.

The article tells us nothing about KFF, the organization whose polls it describes.

KFF, it is important for us to know, is a foundation (it used to be called Kaiser Family Foundation), that is, it is the product of immense wealth. 

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Incite!, 2007) analyzed the dual purpose of foundations: as tax shelters that then use their money to control (or at least attempt to control) the process of social change so that it does not impinge on the privileges of the wealthy. Foundations are thus fundamentally anti-democratic.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which analyzes media bias, has documented KFF bias against single-payer national healthcare/Improved Medicare for All. It is essential that we be aware of this bias whenever we encounter KFF's (mis)use of the data it collects.

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Dr. Anne Scheetz is a founding member of both the Illinois Single Payer Coalition and the Illinois Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program