Health Care

Federal Health Care Subsidies Are Devouring the Budget and Killing Patient Satisfaction

A plague of federal rules and spending is bad medicine.

J.D. Tuccille | 9.23.2026 7:00 AM

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(Illustration: Nikolai Sorokin/Hunterbliss/Michaelfair/Dreamstime)

Getting government involved in any area of human life is an effective way to guarantee you spend gobs of money without improving the situation or making people especially happy. That's clearly true of health care, a field in which government has increasingly intruded for years even as dissatisfaction becomes the norm and costs go through the roof. A recent report finds that health care now consumes almost one of every three dollars the federal government spends, with more to come.

You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.'s commentary on government overreach and threats to everyday liberty.

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Federal Health Spending Is Twice the Size of the Defense Budget

"The largest and fastest-growing category of federal spending is major healthcare programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)," William McBride and Guy Cardwell wrote last week for the Tax Foundation. "As this report shows, total federal healthcare spending, including smaller programs scattered across various agencies, is now nearly one-third of the federal budget."

"In total, the fiscal cost of federal tax expenditures and spending for health care, as of 2025, is nearly $2.7 trillion, or 8.9 percent of GDP," they add. At 31 percent of the budget, the combined cost of federal health programs was "more than twice the size of the........

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