SURPRISE: THE DEMOCRATS ARE WINNING ONE
Health Care is the GOP's Achilles Heel
Democrats, defying predictions of many politicians and pundits and White House expectations, are winning the government shutdown fight.
Democrats have successfully elevated health care and the cost of living to the forefront by insisting the price for their support is extending the Obamacare enhanced tax subsidies slated to expire at the end of the year.
These are enormously popular and enormously important to millions of Americans. If the Affordable Care Act (the official name) benefits are not extended, health care premiums for these working and middle class American families would increase, on average, by more than $1,000. That may not seem much to Donald Trump’s billionaire crowd or members of Congress with their generous health care benefits and $174,000 annual salaries. But it sure is to those living from paycheck to paycheck.
Republicans are on the defensive, making empty promises to deal with health care later or lying: contending this is about giving benefits to undocumented immigrants --- they are ineligible for federal health care benefits -- or Vice President Vance charging the subsidies are riddled with fraud. How did Elon Musk and his band of marauders miss that?
Republicans just hate Obamacare, failing some 70 times to repeal it. To this day, some remain bitter at the late John McCain who thwarted their best shot.
Trump especially hates it because of its commonly used name. If he ever levels with himself -- that could open a Pandora’s box -- he’d acknowledge he never has run against a formidable Democratic opponent. Obama would have beaten him like a drum.
They try to be more nuanced today, talking about “reforming” the Affordable Health Care Act. “When they talk about reform hold onto your wallet and health care,” says Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “What that means is they want to kill it.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune affirmed that the other day when he said the real issue wasn’t the subsidies but the overall measure. Trump, he said, wants to “overhaul” Obamacare.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand what overhaul suggests.
The reality the critics face is the ACA, Obamacare, is embedded in the American political-social-economic fabric. This is crystallized in the current debate over extending the subsidies, which were enacted in 2021 as part of Covid assistance.
If they were repealed, KFF, the respected and reliable health care research firm, reports the impact on lower income Americans not working for an employer who provides health insurance and thus reliant on Obamacare, would be near catastrophic. A farm hand making $28,000, now, with the subsidies, pays $325 for health insurance, would have to pay $1,562 if the subsidies are killed.
It doesn’t get much better up the working class income scale. A clerk for a small business with a household income of $55,000 pays $4,010 for health insurance today; without the subsidies that would shoot up to $5,457, or 10% of their income.
What Trump and most Republicans refuse to acknowledge is in 15 years they’ve never offered a palatable alternative. Obamacare, with some problems, largely is a success. The uninsured rate has been cut in half; somewhere between only 8% to 9% of Americans today are without health insurance.
Ezekiel Emanuel, one of Obamacare’s architects, notes research shows that for every 300 people with health insurance one life is saved.
Back to the shutdown fight, the Democrats, with the Obamacare subsidies, have an a They will find it harder in pushing other important measures like blocking the President from rescinding funds that Congress has appropriated.
A few bed-wetters say this confrontation makes it easier for Russell Vought, Trump’s budget slasher, to fire more employees and shutter entire departments. He already was doing that and will try to continue, shutdown or not, legal or not.
Like the combatants, I don’t know how this showdown will end. Other Democrats privately wonder if by winning on subsidies, they are giving up a good issue for 2026 midterm elections.
But the Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” which they are trying to reframe only months after passage, enacted the biggest cut ever in Medicaid and cut Medicare too in order to help fund tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy.
However it ends, a showdown the Republicans wanted so far is boomeranging.