WHY DID DEMOCRATS FIGHT SO LONG — BEFORE CAVING? The government shutdown lasted 40 days before Senate Democrats abandoned the filibuster that closed offices, left workers without paychecks, threatened supplemental food benefits for millions, began a gradual shutdown of the commercial aviation system, and much more. The question is: Why did those Democrats hold out for so long? Why did they stubbornly play a losing hand even as millions of people suffered?
The short answer: because Obamacare was at stake. The Affordable Care Act is the Democratic Party‘s premier policy achievement of the last half-century, and it is gradually sinking beneath rising costs, making “affordable” health coverage increasingly unaffordable. Without more taxpayer-funded subsidies for recipients, fewer and fewer people will be able to purchase coverage that Democrats once promised would be within everyone’s reach.
So many Democrats have invested so much of their political identity in healthcare, and in their healthcare achievement — remember that Obamacare passed the Senate in 2010 without a single Republican vote — that the prospect of its failure is unthinkable for the Democratic Party.
This is what happened. In 2010, Obamacare was a compromise between those Democrats who wanted to create a national single-payer healthcare system and those who wanted a more market-based arrangement. But all Democrats agreed that the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which established taxpayer-funded subsidies with which millions of people could purchase health coverage, was the beginning of a program that would grow in the years to come.
The problem was that, because Republicans unanimously opposed the system, any expansion of Obamacare or significant increase in its funding would have to come when Democrats controlled the House, Senate, and White House. That time did not come until early 2021, when President Joe Biden took office with a Democratic House and Senate. Together, they immediately passed a set of new subsidies on top of those that already existed in the Affordable Care Act law.
Democrats characterized their long-desired additional subsidies as an “emergency” measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. They would only last one year, expiring in 2022. But then, in 2022, Democrats renewed the additional subsidies — again, as an “emergency” measure — and extended them for three years, until Dec. 31, 2025.
In the meantime, Obamacare premium costs have gone up and up — an estimated 30% this year alone. So this was the situation Democrats faced: Even if the “emergency” subsidies were extended, millions of people would face big premium increases. And if the “emergency” subsidies were allowed to expire — and remember, in 2022, every single Democrat in the Senate voted for the subsidies to expire on Dec. 31, 2025 — then people who purchased coverage through Obamacare would face skyrocketing costs.
By the way, the Biden administration declared the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, 2023. Democrats extended the “emergency” additional subsidies until Dec. 31, 2025. Now, there is simply no “emergency” rationale for extending the additional subsidies.
But there is a political rationale, which is that the cost of Obamacare, contrary to Democrats’ predictions, is rising dramatically. Doing nothing — that is, not pumping more taxpayer-paid subsidies into the system — could risk fewer and fewer people being able to afford health coverage through Obamacare.
So Democrats decided to block funding of the entire government unless Republicans agreed to extend the additional “emergency” subsidies. Republicans, who proposed to keep the government funded first and then discuss any Democratic Obamacare proposal, said no. The House GOP passed a straight, no-tricks government funding proposal. Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block it for 40 days, until the pain of the government shutdown proved too much for a few Democratic senators.
The big picture of what is happening is the failure of the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, some Democrats have admitted that the reason they shut down the government was to hold out for more “emergency” subsidy money because Obamacare has failed to make health coverage affordable. “I owe you an answer on why it is I’m standing here today, asking to extend something that was temporary,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) said on the floor of the Senate a few days ago. “We did fail to bring down the cost of healthcare.”
For Senate Democrats, the only way to deal with that failure was to demand more taxpayer-funded premium subsidies to keep Obamacare afloat. Now, their shutdown has failed, and they will no doubt search for other ways to pump money into their struggling healthcare program.