It will snow on the Independence Day parade in Bristol before we take to these pages with a full-throated defense of the American health care system.

But we also operate under the imperfect reality that our system, flawed as it is, is the only one we have. While it is a rickety vessel with leaks springing everywhere, for better or worse, it is a vessel relied upon by millions of people who navigate chronic diseases, traumatic injuries and every mishap and unplanned medical episode that comes up throughout their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

What the Trump administration has set into motion, and what its Republican allies in Congress are now allowing to happen without losing sleep, is a scuttling of that boat with millions of people still aboard, with no lifejackets to be found and no plans to stage a rescue effort.

When the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1, 2026, the federal tax breaks that have kept insurance premiums semi-affordable for tens of thousands of lower- and lower-middle-income Rhode Islanders will vanish, leaving them with insurance premiums hundreds of dollars a month higher at a time when everyday essentials like food and utilities are already too expensive.

Out of necessity, people will drop insurance, potentially costing them more in state fines and putting them hundreds of thousands of dollars into medical debt if something serious happens. These cuts will affect everyone, no matter who they voted for, in profoundly negative ways, but they will affect the hardest-working classes in America more than anyone.

If there were an actual plan – like ending the insurance-premium subsidies to expose how insurance companies have been systematically gouging Americans and then holding them accountable – perhaps we could see an argument for this course of action.

But there is no plan. The states and the hospitals will be left to distribute the life vests and struggle to provide the care and cover the costs.

This is how Trump rewards the working classes for returning his morally bankrupt circus to the White House? Across the full political spectrum – red, blue and purple – the least affluent among us are being abandoned on a scale this nation has never seen, all so the most affluent among us can have their tax cuts. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s premeditated looting, and history may well look back on it as one of our nation’s worst betrayals of its stated ideals.