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| Families USA launches a campaign |
The mood was grim but determined at Families USA’s Health Action 2026 conference in D.C. last week. Broadly speaking, the focus was dual: mitigating the harm wrought by Republicans’ $1 trillion-plus cuts to Medicaid and the ACA marketplace (and RFK Jr.’s perversion of federal public health agencies), and looking forward toward a positive agenda for making healthcare affordable for all Americans.
Mitigation is largely about slow boring on hard boards: state agencies riding herd on the managed care organization (MCOs) that run most of their Medicaid programs, and advocacy groups riding herd on state agencies to drive that accountability.
The forward-looking agenda was not about ultimate visions for the U.S. healthcare system, such as single-payer or “Medicare for all who want it.” Rather, the focus, mainly in the plenary session “Building the Health Care System We Deserve,” was on spotlighting the extent to which the drive to maximize profit permeates and corrupts all main sectors of the healthcare system — hospital systems and physician practices, insurance and pharma.
That spotlight was synced with a campaign Families USA kicked off with the conference, Stop the Bleed, which aims to challenge every candidate for office in 2026 to explain what they would do to contain healthcare costs — not just what individuals pay, but what all payers collectively pay.
