By Noam N. Levey, KFF Health News

President Donald Trump rode to reelection last fall on voter concerns about prices. But as his administration pares back federal rules and programs designed to protect patients from the high cost of health care, Trump risks pushing more Americans into debt, further straining family budgets already stressed by medical bills.

Millions of people are expected to lose health insurance in the coming years as a result of the tax cut legislation Trump signed in July, leaving them with fewer protections from large bills if they get sick or suffer an accident.

At the same time, significant increases in health plan premiums on state insurance marketplaces next year will likely push more Americans to either drop coverage or switch to higher-deductible plans that will require them to pay more out-of-pocket before their insurance kicks in.

Smaller changes to federal rules are poised to bump up patients’ bills, as well. New federal guidelines for COVID-19 vaccines, for example, will allow health insurers to stop covering the shots for millions, so if patients want the protection, some may have to pay out-of-pocket.

The new tax cut legislation will also raise the cost of certain doctor visits, requiring copays of up to $35 for some Medicaid enrollees.

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And for those who do end up in debt, there will be fewer protections. In July, the Trump administration secured permission from a federal court to roll back regulations that would have removed medical debt from consumer credit reports.

That puts Americans who cannot pay their medical bills at risk of lower credit scores, hindering their ability to get a loan or forcing them to pay higher interest rates.

“For tens of millions of Americans, balancing the budget is like walking a tightrope,” said Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “The Trump administration is just throwing them off.”

White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not respond to questions about how the administration’s health care policies will affect Americans’ medical bills.

The president and his Republican congressional allies have brushed off the health care cuts, including hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid retrenchment in the mammoth tax law. “You won’t even notice it,” Trump said at the White House after the bill signing July 4. “Just waste, fraud, and abuse.”

But consumer and patient advocates around the country warn that the erosion of federal health care protections since Trump took office in January threatens to significantly undermine Americans’ financial security.

“These changes will hit our communities hard,” said Arika Sánchez, who oversees health care policy at the nonprofit New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty.

Sánchez predicted many more people the center works with will end up with medical debt. “When families get stuck with medical debt, it hurts their credit scores, makes it harder to get a car, a home, or even a job,” she said. “Medical debt wrecks people’s lives.”

For Americans with serious illnesses such as cancer, weakened federal protections from medical debt pose yet one more risk, said Elizabeth Darnall, senior director of federal advocacy at the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network. “People will not seek out the treatment they need,” she said.

Trump promised a rosier future while campaigning last year, pledging to “make America affordable again” and “expand access to new Affordable Healthcare.”

Polls suggest voters were looking for relief.

About 6 in 10 adults — Democrats and Republicans — say they are worried about being able to afford health care, according to one recent survey, outpacing concerns about the cost of food or housing. And medical debt remains a widespread problem: As many as 100 million adults in the U.S. are burdened by some kind of health care debt.

Despite this, key tools that have helped prevent even more Americans from sinking into debt are now on the chopping block.

Medicaid and other government health insurance programs, in particular, have proved to be a powerful economic backstop for low-income patients and their families, said Kyle Caswell, an economist at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Caswell and other researchers found, for example, that Medicaid expansion made possible by the 2010 Affordable Care Act led to measurable declines in medical debt and improvements in consumers’ credit scores in states that implemented the expansion.

“We’ve seen that these programs have a meaningful impact on people’s financial well-being,” Caswell said.

Trump’s tax law — which will slash more than $1 trillion in federal health spending over the next decade, mostly through Medicaid cuts — is expected to leave 10 million more people without health coverage by 2034, according to the latest estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The tax cuts, which primarily benefit wealthy Americans, will add $3.4 trillion to U.S. deficits over a decade, the office calculated.

The number of uninsured could spike further if Trump and his congressional allies don’t renew additional federal subsidies for low- and moderate-income Americans who buy health coverage on state insurance marketplaces.

This aid — enacted under former President Joe Biden — lowers insurance premiums and reduces medical bills enrollees face when they go to the doctor or the hospital. But unless congressional Republicans act, those subsidies will expire later this year, leaving many with bigger bills.

Federal debt regulations developed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Biden administration would have protected these people and others if they couldn’t pay their medical bills.

The agency issued rules in January that would have removed medical debts from consumer credit reports. That would have helped an estimated 15 million people.

But the Trump administration chose not to defend the new regulations when they were challenged in court by debt collectors and the credit bureaus, who argued the federal agency had exceeded its authority in issuing the rules. A federal judge in Texas appointed by Trump ruled that the regulation should be scrapped.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By TERRY TANG and AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX

WASHINGTON (AP) — Slightly less than half of U.S. adults believe that Black people face “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of discrimination in the United States, according to a poll. That’s a decline from the solid majority, 60%, who thought Black Americans faced high levels of discrimination in the spring of 2021, months after racial reckoning protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd.

Significant numbers of Americans also think diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, also known as DEI, are backfiring against the groups they’re intended to help, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, including many people who belong to those groups.

The findings suggest Americans’ views on racial discrimination have shifted substantially since four years ago, when many companies launched efforts to promote diversity within their workforces and the products they sold.

Since then, many of those companies have reversed themselves and retreated from their diversity practices, a trend that’s accelerated this year under pressure from President Donald Trump, a Republican who has sought to withhold federal money from schools and companies that promote DEI.

Now, it’s clear that views are changing as well as company policies.

Claudine Brider, a 48-year-old Black Democrat in Compton, California, says the concept of DEI has made the workplace difficult for Black people and women in new ways.

“Anytime they’re in a space that they’re not expected to be, like seeing a Black girl in an engineering course … they are seen as only getting there because of those factors,” Brider said. “It’s all negated by someone saying, ‘You’re only here to meet a quota.’”

Reversal in views of racial discrimination

The poll finds 45% of U.S. adults think Black people face high levels of discrimination, down from 60% in the spring of 2021. There was a similar drop in views about the prevalence of serious discrimination against Asian people, which fell from 45% in the 2021 poll — conducted a month after the Atlanta spa shootings, which killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent — to 32% in the current survey.

There’s no question the country has backtracked from its “so-called racial reckoning” and the experiences of particular groups such as Black people are being downplayed, said Phillipe Copeland, a professor at Boston University School of Social Work.

Americans’ views about discrimination haven’t shifted when it comes to all groups, though. Just under half of U.S. adults, 44%, now say Hispanic people face at least “quite a bit of discrimination,” and only 15% say this about white people. Both numbers are similar to when the question was last asked in April 2021.

Divisions on the impact of DEI on Black and Hispanic people

The poll indicates that less than half of Americans think DEI has a benefit for the people it’s intended to help.

About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say DEI reduces discrimination against Black people, while about one-third say this about Hispanic people, women and Asian people. Many — between 33% and 41% — don’t think DEI makes a difference either way. About one-quarter of U.S. adults believe that DEI actually increases discrimination against these groups.

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Black and Hispanic people are more likely than white people to think DEI efforts end up increasing discrimination against people like them.

About 4 in 10 Black adults and about one-third of Hispanic adults say DEI increases discrimination against Black people, compared with about one-quarter of white adults. There is a similar split between white adults and Black and Hispanic adults on assessments of discrimination against Hispanic people.

Among white people, it’s mostly Democrats who think DEI efforts reduce discrimination against Black and Hispanic people. Only about one-quarter of white independents and Republicans say the same.

Pete Parra, a 59-year-old resident of Gilbert, Arizona, thinks that DEI is making things harder for racial minorities now. He worries about how his two adult Hispanic sons will be treated when they apply for work.

“I’m not saying automatically just give it to my sons,” said Parra, who leans toward the Democratic Party. But he’s concerned that now factors other than merit may take priority.

“If they get passed over for something,” he said, “they’re not going to know (why).”

About 3 in 10 say DEI increases discrimination against white people

The poll shows that Americans aren’t any more likely to think white people face discrimination than they were in 2021. And more than half think DEI doesn’t make a difference when it comes to white people or men.

But a substantial minority — about 3 in 10 U.S. adults — think DEI increases discrimination against white people. Even more white adults, 39%, hold that view, compared with 21% of Hispanic adults and 13% of Black adults.

The recent political focus on DEI has included the idea that white people are more often overlooked for career and educational opportunities because of their race.

John Bartus, a 66-year-old registered Republican in Twin Falls, Idaho, says that DEI might have been “a good thing for all races of people, but it seems like it’s gone far left.” It’s his impression that DEI compels companies to hire people based on their race or if they identify as LGBTQ+.

“The most qualified person ought to get a job based on their merit or based on their educational status,” Bartus said.

Brider, the Black California resident, objects to the notion that white people face the same level of discrimination as Black people. But while she thinks the aims of DEI are admirable, she also sees the reality as flawed.

“I do think there needs to be something that ensures that there is a good cross-section of people in the workplace,” Brider said. “I just don’t know what that would look like, to be honest.”

The AP-NORC poll of 1,437 adults was conducted July 10-14, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

By ISABELLA VOLMERT, Associated Press

FLINT, Mich. (AP) — A procession of mothers wearing red sashes, pushing strollers and tending to toddlers made their way Friday to a little festival in Flint, Michigan, where families received diapers and kids played.

It was called a “baby parade.”

The sashes indicated the women were participants of a growing program in Michigan that helps pregnant women and new moms by giving them cash over the first year of their children’s lives. Launched in 2024, the program comes at a time when many voters worry over high child care costs and President Donald Trump’s administration floats policy to reverse the declining birth rate.

Backed by a mix of state, local and philanthropic money, Rx Kids gives mothers of newborns up to $7,500, with no income requirements and no rules for how the money is spent. Supporters believe the program could be a model for mitigating the high cost of having children in the U.S.

“There’s all kinds of reasons, no matter what your political affiliation or ideology is, to support this,” said state Sen. John Damoose, a Republican and ardent supporter of the program.

Dr. Mona Hanna, creator of the Flint Rx Kids program, at the Hurley’s Children Clinic ahead of the Flint Rx Kids Baby Parade on July 25, 2025 in Flint, Mich. (AP Photo/Emily Elconin)

How the program works

To qualify, women need to prove they live in a participating location and that they are pregnant, but don’t have to share details about their income.

It’s designed to be simple.

Pregnant women receive $1,500 before delivery and $500 every month for the first six to 12 months of their babies’ lives, depending on the program location.

Dr. Mona Hanna, a pediatrician, associate dean for public health at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and the program’s founding director, said that window is a time of great economic vulnerability for new parents — and a critical developmental period for babies.

Most participants need diapers, formula, breast feeding supplies and baby clothes but every family’s needs are different. The monthly payment can also help buy food and cover rent, utilities and transportation.

For some moms, the extra cash allows them to afford child care and return to work. For others, it allows them to stay home longer.

The program so far is available in Flint, Pontiac, Kalamazoo and five counties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. By fall, it will expand to a rural central Michigan county and several cities near Detroit.

Hanna said the main piece of feedback she hears is that the program should be bigger. She’s heard from lawmakers and others hoping to start similar programs in other states.

What’s the impact

Hanna said the program’s data shows nearly all pregnant women in Flint have signed up since it became available.

The locations were designed to target low-income families, though there is no income requirement. Luke Shaefer, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and a co-founder of Rx Kids, said they wanted to eliminate any stigma or barriers that discourage people from signing up.

The founders also want mothers to feel celebrated, hence the parade Friday.

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“For so long moms have been vilified and not supported,” Hanna said.

Friends told Angela Sintery, 44, about Rx Kids when she found out she was pregnant with her second child. She’s a preschool teacher who spread the word to other parents.

Sintery had her first daughter 19 years before her second and had to buy all new baby supplies.

She said the cash provided by Rx Kids would have been helpful when she had her first child at age 24, before she went to college.

“So this time around, I didn’t have to stress about anything. I just had to worry about my baby,” she said.

Celeste Lord-Timlin, a Flint resident and program participant, attended the baby parade with her husband and 13-month-old daughter by her side. She said the deposits helped her pay for graduate school while she was pregnant.

“It allowed us to really enjoy being new parents,” she said.

Changing the conversation

The program relies heavily on philanthropic donations but Hanna’s long-term goal is for the government to be the main provider.

“I see philanthropy as the doula of this program, they are helping birth it,” she said. “They are helping us prove that this is possible.”

Democrats in Michigan’s state Senate introduced legislation in February that would make the program available to any pregnant woman in the state and it has bipartisan support. But with a divided Legislature only able to pass six bills total this year, it’s unlikely the program will yet expand statewide soon.

Even Damoose, among the program’s top backers, said he doesn’t think Michigan can afford statewide expansion yet. But the lawmaker who represents parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan does want to keep growing it.

For fellow Republicans who oppose abortion as he does, the approach is a “no brainer” way to help pregnant women, Damoose said.

“We’ve been accused for years and years, and not without cause, of being pro-birth, but not pro-life,” he said. “And this is a way for us to put our money where our mouth is.”

The cost of kids

A new movement of pro-natalist political figures, including Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk and other members of Trump’s periphery, have harped on the country’s declining birth rate.

But a recent Associated Press-NORC poll found that most Americans want the government to focus on the high costs of child care — not just the number of babies being born here.

Under Trump’s tax and spending bill that Congress passed in July, the child tax credit is boosted from $2,000 child tax credit to $2,200. But millions of families at lower income levels will not get the full credit.

The bill will also create a new children’s saving program, called Trump Accounts, with a potential $1,000 deposit from the Treasury.

That’s not available until children grow up and is more focused on building wealth rather than immediate relief, Hanna said.

“We don’t have that social infrastructure to invest in our families,” Hanna said. “No wonder people aren’t having children and our birth rates are going down.”

The Trump administration has also toyed with the idea of giving families one-time $5,000 “baby bonuses,” a policy similar to Rx Kids.

Critics have rightly pointed out that doesn’t come close to covering the cost of child care or other expenses. Defenders of a cash-in-hand approach, though, say any amount can help in those critical early months.

“I think it’s part of a new narrative or the rekindling of an old narrative where we start to celebrate children and families,” said Damoose.

Associated Press writer Mike Householder contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage eased to where it was three weeks ago, modest relief for prospective homebuyers challenged by rising home prices and stubbornly high borrowing costs.

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The long-term rate slipped to 6.72% from 6.74% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.73%.

Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also eased. The average rate dropped to 5.85% from 5.87% last week. A year ago, it was 5.99%, Freddie Mac said.

Elevated mortgage rates continue to weigh on the U.S. housing market, which has been in a sales slump going back to 2022, when rates started to climb from the rock-bottom lows they reached during the pandemic.

Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors’ expectations for the economy and inflation.

The main barometer is the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans. The yield was at 4.34% at midday Thursday, down from 4.37% late Wednesday.

Yields moved higher most of July as traders bet that the Fed would keep its key short-term interest rate unchanged at its meeting this month.

On Wednesday, the central bank’s policymaking committee voted to hold its main interest rate steady. And Fed Chair Jerome Powell pushed back on expectations that the Fed could cut rates at its next meeting in September, pointing to how inflation remains above the Fed’s 2% target, while the job market still looks to be “in balance.”

A cut in rates would give the job market and overall economy a boost, but it could also fuel inflation just as the Trump administration’s tariffs risk raising prices for U.S. consumers.

“If a September rate cut starts to be more likely, it is possible that we could see mortgage rates edge downward at the end of the summer, similar to what we saw last year at this time,” said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS. “If inflation expectations continue to be high, mortgage rates could also remain higher.”