Trump Defends U.S. Healthcare, Says It ‘Covers a Lot of People’
During a phone interview with Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Trump told guest host Larry Kudlow: “We have the best healthcare plans in the world. Now that doesn’t cover everybody, but it covers a lot of people.”
November 3 is coming fast, and Trump was calling in to stump for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who supports Medicare for All.
Trump used healthcare as his attack angle. The argument: if the government takes over healthcare, union workers and autoworkers lose the private plans they’ve spent decades negotiating for. “You tell the union, you tell the autoworkers, they’re going to lose their healthcare plan,” Trump said. “It’s socialized medicine, and it never works.”
It’s a line that has worked before. Union workers — especially in the auto industry — have historically bargained for generous employer-sponsored health coverage. The threat of losing that hits differently than abstract policy arguments.
Trump Cites Friends’ Private Plans
Trump’s evidence for America having the world’s best healthcare? His friends like their insurance.
“I have friends that have these private health plans, and they’re given by these big grade companies — insurance companies, healthcare companies — and they love it. It’s not expensive, and it’s great.”
He also said that people from other countries travel to the United States when they need serious medical care — a common argument for the quality ceiling of American medicine, which is real. The U.S. genuinely leads in cancer treatment, medical innovation, cutting-edge procedures, and specialist access. If you have good insurance and need something complicated done, there may be nowhere better.
The problem is the “if.”
What the Data Says
The Commonwealth Fund ranks high-income countries on healthcare every year. The U.S. consistently places last or near-last overall — not on quality at the top, but on access, equity, and outcomes across the full population. The U.S. spends more per person on healthcare than any other developed country, by a lot. And it still leaves an estimated 25 to 28 million people uninsured as of 2026.
No other wealthy nation has that gap. Not Canada, not Germany, not France, not the U.K. None of them. All have universal or near-universal coverage — and spends less doing it.
What Trump described is accurate in a narrow sense. If you have excellent employer-sponsored insurance, American healthcare can be extraordinary. Specialists, technology, access to experimental treatments — it’s genuinely world-class. His friends love their plans. That’s believable.
But “the best healthcare” and “the best healthcare for people with good private insurance” are different claims. Critics say Trump made the first one and then immediately confirmed it was really the second one.
The Midterm Backdrop
Trump’s approval rating sits at 34%, the lowest for a sitting president heading into midterms since Harry Truman in 1946, according to polling cited in coverage of the interview. Trump dismissed those numbers as “fake.” The midterms are November 3.
Healthcare is shaping up as one of the central issues — particularly in Michigan, where the auto industry and union politics collide with the national debate in unusually personal ways. How voters weigh Trump’s argument that their current plans are worth protecting against arguments that the system still leaves millions behind may be one of the things that decides the race.
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