Trump is promising $90 Medicare rebate checks ahead of the midterms. Here's the hidden cost.

By Brett Arends

The president is betting that he can make seniors forget rising healthcare costs

President Donald Trump is campaigning hard for the midterms.

President Donald Trump's latest political stunt could buy seniors a couple of tanks of gas - and cost American taxpayers an extra $100 million a year in national-debt interest.

Late last week, the president promised to send $90 checks to millions of middle-class seniors touted as a Medicare Improvement Fund Premium rebate, just in time for the midterm elections. Almost $100. It's not chump change, but will it be enough to make recipients forget about how much their healthcare costs have climbed in the past two years?

Sadly, to pull off this maneuver, which would target a coveted voting bloc, the U.S. government will have to borrow the $2 billion cost from the bond markets. They currently charge the government 5.3% annual interest, a generational high, on benchmark 10-year bonds.

These $90 checks are a one-off. The interest, though, is forever.

But who's to say that isn't a reasonable price to pay to rescue Trump and the Republicans from midterm disaster? Or to help Ohio's John Husted, Ken Paxton of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine, Alaska's Dan Sullivan and other beleaguered Republicans facing tight Senate races?

Trump's other announcement, that he has "already cut Medicare premiums by $132 a year," may surprise many seniors.

Medicare premiums rose this year by an inflation-busting 10%, or $234, to $2,434.80 a year. They have now risen 16%, or three times as fast as inflation, since Joe Biden's last year in office in 2024.

We do not yet know the official numbers for 2027 Medicare premiums, but experts expect them to rise yet again.

But an administration official says premiums would have risen in 2026 by an additional $11 a month, or $132 a year, if it weren't for savings achieved by tackling fraud - for example, in government spending on skin substitutes for wound care.

Those savings are not small potatoes: The skin substitutes cost taxpayers billions, and the figure has risen dramatically since before the pandemic. The administration reckons it can cut them by 90%. We shall see.

The president's move to send out $90 checks is political genius. He had already floated the idea of $5,000 checks, but only if people voted for his party. The cost was ridiculous ($1.2 trillion), and everyone admitted he needed approval from Congress, which was not going to happen.

And there were the $500 refunds Trump promised to 1 million Americans to offset high healthcare costs resulting from alleged "mismanagement" of the health-insurance plans operated under the Affordable Care Act during the Biden administration.

But the latest boondoggle does an end run around Congress, meaning Trump can send out the checks quickly, without any approval from anyone.

Trump said he found the money sitting in, effectively, a hidden bank account buried within the federal government. The implication was that "the Deep State" was hiding the money.

The reality is that this account in question doesn't exist in the way you or I think of a bank account. This "Medicare Improvement Fund" is just an accounting device, a line item on a spreadsheet, within the nearly $8 trillion federal budget.

Meanwhile, thanks in part to the massive, unfunded 2017 and 2025 Trump tax cuts, the U.S. government is now borrowing at least $5 billion a day to finance its epic budget deficits.

The cost of this election sweetener will have to be added to the bill. The good news is that the national debt is now so gigantic that no one will really notice.

The checks will go to middle-class seniors. Those whose Medicare premiums are paid by Medicaid will not get a check. Nor will those paying the IRMMA Medicare premium surtax. Nor those on the privatized "Medicare Advantage" program. That leaves about 21 million beneficiaries.

This is really smart pork-barrel politics. Seniors typically vote in higher numbers than other groups. They played a key role four years ago in rescuing another unpopular party, then the Democrats, during midterm elections. Who's to say this won't happen again?

Maybe this will help offset some of the spiraling cost of living sparked by Trump's deficits, tariffs and war against Iran.

It was exactly 100 years ago this year that H.L. Mencken, the legendary journalist, said: "No one in this world...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

Is it still true today? Stay tuned.

-Brett Arends

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10-05-26 1639ET