ZERO.
That’s the number of Republicans who voted to create the grossly misnamed Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) in 2010. It’s the number of Republicans who voted for the grossly misnamed and historically inflationary American Rescue Plan in 2021, which expanded subsidies for marketplace health insurance plans under the guise of the COVID emergency. And it’s the number of Republicans who voted for the again grossly misnamed — by Joe Biden’s own admission — Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which extended those expanded subsidies.
ZERO.
Democrats are solely responsible for the fiscal and health disaster that is ObamaCare.
Yet they keep blaming Republicans for the Chuck Schumer Shutdown because Republicans didn’t do a 180 and include the expanded subsidies they never wanted or voted for in the continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open. Most Republicans are not inclined to save Democrats from the budget monster they created.
The House passed a clean CR. Senate Democrats are blocking it from reaching the 60-vote threshold, holding the government hostage for extended subsidies — hence the shutdown.
For nearly 20 years, Democrats have been lying to you about the cost of ObamaCare. It will reduce premiums, they swore over and over. Spoiler alert: It didn’t.
When Democrats passed the law, they front-loaded its revenue provisions while delaying its outlays to make the 10-year cost appear more favorable, but it has cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion over the last 15 years. When COVID came along, Democrats saw an opportunity to expand the number of people on the federal exchange, but doing so meant spending more money on subsidies, and they fully intended to make that a permanent new feature of the entitlement.
“These emergency subsidies were supposed to be temporary,” notes Matthew Continetti. “The original legislation ended them in two years. But in 2022, as part of the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats extended them until 2025. Now they’re set to go on December 31.”
Economics 101: Subsidies don’t reduce the price for something; they just redistribute the cost. In fact, most often, subsidies raise prices by increasing demand without also increasing supply.
ObamaCare was even worse because it affects nearly everyone. It’s textbook fascism, for one thing, using government power to dictate what private companies must sell and then mandating that consumers buy the product. From a purely supply-and-demand standpoint, adding the sickest and poorest people to the health insurance rolls, while noble-sounding, raises prices significantly for everyone. There are now 24 million Americans who purchase insurance on the ObamaCare exchange, and Americans who buy private plans pay higher prices to help finance ObamaCare discounts.
That expense isn’t the sole reason for our national debt woes, but it’s a big one. “Obamacare subsidies — $91 billion — are a teardrop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool of spending,” Continetti explains. “In 2023 the federal government spent $1.6 trillion on healthcare for a staggering 150 million Americans. This year’s deficit … is projected to reach $1.8 trillion. Interest payments — that’s just the cost of servicing our debt — will near $1 trillion. All this adds to the $38 trillion national debt.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, “The 10-year cost of this income transfer to health insurers is roughly $450 billion.” The high price tag comes because of a simple truth: “Democrats removed the income cap on ObamaCare subsidies and allowed the money to flow to affluent households earning as much as $500,000 a year.”
The real crisis isn’t the shutdown, which barely anyone outside the Beltway actually even notices. It’s the national debt. Democrats’ response is to scream for more spending.
ObamaCare is a terrible policy economically. Furthermore, despite Chief Justice John Roberts’s infamous contortions to rewrite the law in order to save it, ObamaCare is unconstitutional. There is no constitutionally enumerated power that allows the federal government to create such a law.
Yet ObamaCare was a stroke of political genius.
Democrats successfully created the biggest new entitlement since the Great Society in the 1960s, and as we all know, entitlements never go away. Usually quite the opposite. Why? Because each one has a constituency that will demand it in perpetuity.
Anyone who opposes an entitlement is falsely cast as wanting to take away benefits from the needy to give gifts to the rich, while those who wish to expand entitlements congratulate themselves for being so “generous” (with your money, by the way), often cloaking income redistribution in bogus Christian terms. (Christian nationalism is bad unless Democrats do it.)
There’s no way Democrats will agree to a short-term extension, said House Minority Leader Hakeem “Sombrero” Jeffries, when Republicans “just permanently extended massive tax breaks for their billionaire donors.” He laid out the Dems’ negotiating position: “Permanent extension, and let’s go from there.”
That political genius is why cracks are starting to show in the GOP line.
President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others have all expressed interest in negotiating on what an extension of ObamaCare subsidies might look like — at least after Democrats agree to turn the lights back on.
“If we made the right deal, I’d make a deal. Sure,” Trump told reporters. In other remarks, he added, “It’s not working. ObamaCare has been a disaster for the people, so we want to have it fixed so it works.”
Thune also hedged, saying, “You cannot just extend it, flat extend it. It is too flawed.” He called Jeffries’s position “unrealistic and unserious,” saying Democrats are living in a “dream world.”
Unfortunately, Greene is now demanding an extension. “I’m going to go against everyone on this issue because when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district,” she wrote in a lengthy and ideologically incoherent post on X.
Most subsidies won’t even expire, and premiums won’t double, though the portion consumers pay themselves might in some scenarios. She’s conflating premiums with out-of-pocket costs, along with making other errors typical of the Left.
Democrats aren’t making anything cheaper, either. They just want to finance the cost with more debt from China, paid back by your grandchildren.
However, for the 20 million Americans about to be saddled with a much bigger bill, the semantics won’t matter, and populists like Greene know it.
Again, that’s the political genius of ObamaCare, and unless Republicans can figure out real reform alternatives, they’ll keep losing every single battle over the biggest entitlement in a generation.
