More than a week into the first government shutdown in nearly seven years, congressional Democrats are showing no signs of backing the GOP’s proposed clean continuing resolution that would maintain federal spending at the sky-high levels of former President Joe Biden‘s presidency. Nor do they seem willing to admit why they’re holding some 900,000 federal workers hostage.
According to Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Republicans are actually to blame, and they’re keeping the government shut down to conceal the nonexistent Jeffrey Epstein files. Ask Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), and it’s all a part of President Donald Trump’s plan for an “authoritarian takeover” to “tilt the election playing field [his] way and destroy the idea of truth.” In the words of Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), “This is just more of [the White House’s] Project 2025 assault on our government.”
Practically speaking, the Democrats are the ones who have repeatedly rejected clean continuing resolutions from the party in power, and regardless of the rhetoric, it’s the Democratic Party that handed Congress’s power of the purse to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. And the real reason, despite all the high-minded defenses of “democracy” and Epstein conspiracy theories, is that the Affordable Care Act has run out of cash to conceal its veneer of affordability.
To clarify here, the GOP has still failed to fulfill 15 years of promises and repeal the Affordable Care Act outright. From the premium tax credits to expansion dollars, Obamacare, under a Republican trifecta controlling Washington, D.C., receives multiple times the amount of taxpayer funding that it got under its namesake, former President Barack Obama. About $250 billion has gone to the Affordable Care Act during the first fiscal year of Trump’s second term.
But Democrats wish to undo the most minor of Trump’s reforms to rein in the COVID-19-era expansion of the Affordable Care Act and its coverage of illegal immigrants.
The crux of the Democrats’ demands is that Trump permanently expand Biden’s premium tax credit coverage to include Americans earning more than 400% of the federal poverty line and reduce the maximum household contribution. Forestalling the expiration of this expansion, which was due to come later this year regardless, would cost $350 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The Democrats also want to relitigate Trump’s 2025 signature domestic law, his self-proclaimed “one big, beautiful bill.” Hill Democrats pointedly did not even try to influence back when House Republicans began drafting the reconciliation bill in the spring. There’s the slew of Affordable Care Act-funded expansions to Medicaid that Democrats wish to restore in defiance of the law. All in all, the Democratic proposal is to add at least another trillion dollars to our national debt on top of the outstanding $37.5 trillion.
The overwhelming majority of Americans do not benefit from the Affordable Care Act. Only 7% of the country is enrolled in a marketplace plan, and even broadening the definition to include Medicaid expansion coverage as well as marketplace plans, just 13% of the population uses Obamacare. The CBO estimates that even if Democrats got all of their wishes, roughly 2% of the population would benefit.
And at what cost?
JOHNSON AND ARIZONA DEMOCRATIC SENATORS SPAR OVER SWEARING IN ADELITA GRIJALVA
The Affordable Care Act explicitly made non-Affordable Care Act, employer-sponsored health insurance more expensive, notably through increased compliance costs, regulations, and taxes, as well as the obliteration of the high-deductible, low-premium plans that served as the backbone of health insurance for younger and less wealthy workers. But by throwing money at an industry that already had rampant demand, the government did with Obamacare subsidies what it did with student loan subsidies: it made the entire industry more expensive.
When the Democrats warn that without once-in-a-century pandemic-era subsidies, the Affordable Care Act will no longer be affordable, they are telling on themselves. Like all government entitlements based on subsidizing demand, Obamacare has proven it will effectively bankrupt itself, and all Republicans have to do this time is stand by and watch Democrats let it happen.