Donald Trump's recently-released healthcare "plan" would be an unmitigated disaster, according to a nonpartisan policy organization, the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which conducted a formal assessment. Or at least as formal assessment as could be done on what is basically a hodgepodge of conservative ideas.
The number of people without health insurance would rise by something like 21 million people if Trump had his way. That would mean more financial hardship, less access to health care, and—according to a large, if occasionally contested, body of research -- higher mortality. Trump’s plan could also increase the deficit by somewhere between $270 billion and $490 billion over ten years—depending in part on how the repeal affected the rest of the economy.
These numbers are extremely rough, in part because Trump's "plan" is more like a set of talking points than a detailed proposal from which analysts could make a firm projection. And in theory, Trump's new health care plan could increase the deficit by less—or even create a surplus—with huge cuts to Medicaid, the government program that provides health insurance for the poor. But significantly reducing what the federal government spends on Medicaid would mean significantly reducing access to care for millions of Americans now on the program. That group includes children and pregnant women, the disabled, the elderly, and adults who have jobs but simply can’t afford insurance.
This analysis is true for most of the proposals that Republicans have come up with so far, since that's what Trump borrowed from—for example, replacing subsidies that people now get to buy health insurance on the exchanges with tax deductions that would go to only a portion of the people now getting subsidies. Or allowing insurance sales across state lines, where insurers could flock to the states that had the worst insurance regulations and sell from there. All of the regulations forcing insurers to take on everyone would be abolished, so people with pre-existing conditions would be locked out, again. Medicaid would be drastically cut.
Millions of people would be cut off of Medicaid. Insurance would be so poorly regulated it would become essentially worthless for many. This, like every Republican proposal so far, wouldn't just take us back to the bad old days pre-Obamacare. It would be much, much worse than those days.