{"id":215826,"date":"2025-10-15T22:27:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/215826\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T22:27:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:27:15","slug":"theres-something-weirdly-familiar-about-this-new-gop-argument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/215826\/","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s Something Weirdly Familiar About This New GOP Argument"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Making sure they\u2019re all on the same page: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) flanked by Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). (Photo by Kent Nishimura\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

THE LATEST REPUBLICAN TALKING POINT on the government shutdown sounds like one you\u2019ve heard many times before: Obamacare sucks.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s their new argument for why a temporary boost to the Affordable Care Act\u2019s subsidies<\/a> should expire on schedule after December instead of being renewed or made permanent. If the money stops, insurance premiums will double for more than 20 million Americans. But Republicans are insisting that\u2019s okay, because the system itself can\u2019t be saved. Here\u2019s House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on Friday, making the case<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Why would you keep pouring billions more tax dollars into a sinkhole when you can find a better way? We actually are working on better alternatives right now to lower premiums for families. That\u2019s where the focus should be, not propping up a failed product called Obamacare.<\/p>\n

The argument sounds familiar because Republicans have been calling the Affordable Care Act a failure ever since President Barack Obama first signed the legislation in 2010. Its reappearance now, going into the third week of the shutdown, feels like an acknowledgment that unfounded claims about giving free insurance to \u201cillegal aliens<\/a>\u201d and bailing out insurance companies<\/a> haven\u2019t won<\/a> the public to the Republican party\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

The switch to this latest broadside against Obamacare could, in theory, help Republicans, given that talking about problems in U.S. health care is bound to resonate. Even today, fifteen years after the Affordable Care Act\u2019s enactment, tens of millions of Americans still have no insurance or have coverage yet struggle with medical bills<\/a>. That\u2019s to say nothing of the byzantine bureaucracies<\/a> that make life miserable for both patients and providers\u2014or the heavy financial burden that U.S. health care costs<\/a>, still the world\u2019s highest by far, place on businesses and governments and through them employees and taxpayers.<\/p>\n

But there is also a flaw in what Republicans like Scalise are saying: Not even Obama himself ever promised his eponymously nicknamed law would solve all of America\u2019s health care problems. The promise was that it would make things better<\/a>\u2014primarily, by helping a ton of people to get insurance, moving us closer to the day when health care is a basic right of citizenship like it is in every other developed country.<\/p>\n

And if there\u2019s any doubt about whether the Affordable Care Act succeeded<\/a> in that task, all you have to do is remember all of the problems in American health care before the law took effect; why fixing them was so damn hard; and why even many of the law\u2019s skeptics now have conceded they can\u2019t go back to a time before the law was passed.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

LIFE BEFORE THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT was pretty different, though it\u2019s been long enough that some people seem to have forgotten.<\/p>\n

Back in 2008, when Obama first ran for president, 45 million people<\/a> had no health insurance, accounting for a bit more than 15 percent of the population<\/a>. They were primarily people who couldn\u2019t afford the insurance that was available, along with people who had pre-existing conditions that insurers would refuse to cover. And when they couldn\u2019t get medical care or pay their bills, bad things happened<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They went into debt. They skipped going to a doctor or rationed their care. They got sick. Sometimes they died.<\/p>\n

These were not new problems. Their roots lay in decisions made in the early twentieth century<\/a>, when medicine was first becoming expensive enough that most people couldn\u2019t afford it. Every other economically advanced country responded by creating some kind of national health system that guaranteed private or public insurance to every citizen, with financing through taxes and some kind of overall government control on prices.<\/p>\n

Efforts to create a similar system in the United States fizzled. What emerged instead by the middle of the century\u2014through a combination of private and public-sector action\u2014was a messy patchwork that relied primarily on employers to provide insurance to workers and their families. Although it worked for some people, it left out those who were poor or didn\u2019t have a lot of money\u2014even after the 1965 creation of Medicare, to cover the elderly, and Medicaid, to cover (some of) the poor.<\/p>\n

Nobody ever thought this arrangement was ideal. But with every passing year, changing it became more difficult<\/a> because of everybody with a stake in the status quo. That included the insurance industry, organized medicine, and all sorts of interest groups\u2014as well as those already insured who, whatever their grievances with the way things were, worried the alternatives would be worse. That factor loomed especially large in the minds of Obama and his allies, many of whom had worked on the Clinton health care effort<\/a> in the 1990s. Going in, they were determined to succeed where past reformers had failed, by filling in the system\u2019s gaps rather than trying to wreck and rebuild it\u2014and by co-opting (or at least not alienating) all of the powerful interest groups that had stymied past reform efforts.<\/p>\n

The gambit worked<\/a>: They were able to pass the single biggest health care reform in more than forty years, causing the number and percentage of Americans without coverage to plummet<\/a>. And while critics of the law frequently argue the coverage expansion was unhelpful or even counterproductive, a large, still-growing list of studies has backed up what so many people have seen with their own eyes: The law has made a big difference.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Affordable Care Act made it easier for people to access medical care, it made them better off financially and it reduced the probability that they died,\u201d Sarah Miller<\/a>, a University of Michigan economist who has done some of the most groundbreaking work on the subject, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not just my research that says that. It\u2019s this whole body of research behind me.\u201d<\/p>\n

BUT THERE WAS ALWAYS a big asterisk on those gains. The politically grueling effort to pass the Affordable Care Act included compromises that reduced the program\u2019s reach.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most significantly, the law had less money for private insurance subsidies than Obama and Democratic leaders had wanted. That was a big deal because the law\u2019s new requirements on private coverage\u2014making sure it was available to anybody, not just healthy people, and always included standard benefits\u2014drove up the premiums. The subsidies were there to offset that increase and with less funding, they couldn\u2019t have the same impact.<\/p>\n

The result was \u201crate shock<\/a>\u201d for people who had been buying the older, cheaper policies. Explanations that the new coverage was more comprehensive and reliable didn\u2019t do much to mollify them, especially those who remembered\u2014bitterly\u2014Democratic promises<\/a> that they could keep their old plans.<\/p>\n

From the beginning, Obama and his allies said they wanted to keep building off the law, not treat it as the end-all-be-all. They framed it as improving a \u201cstarter home<\/a>\u201d by\u2014among other things\u2014making the subsidies more generous<\/a>. That is exactly what Joe Biden and Democrats did in 2021 when they included enhanced subsidies as part of their COVID pandemic response legislation, and then renewed them through 2025\u2014noting, correctly, that with the extra money enrollment in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces had more than doubled<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reason Democrats didn\u2019t extend the subsidy boost even further into the future is that\u2014once again\u2014they didn\u2019t have the votes. And a big reason for that is a very real, very familiar tradeoff for extending the subsidies: It would cost about $35 billion a year, which would add to the deficit unless lawmakers approved offsets in the form of other cuts or new revenue.<\/p>\n

There is no shortage of ideas<\/a> on the latter, starting with a clawback of the (much larger) tax cuts for wealthy Americans that Donald Trump and the Republicans enacted over the summer. But while those ideas would find tons of support on the Democratic side, they would be nonstarters with Republicans. The GOP\u2019s basic posture<\/a> on health care is that government meddling makes everything more expensive, and hurts the economy too, in ways that ultimately offset whatever gains come from expanded coverage. They also have philosophical objections: Many believe the taxes to finance health care are morally wrong, just as many Democrats believe that guaranteeing health insurance is morally right.<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t really provable or unprovable assertions. But they clearly don\u2019t seem to be convincing the voters. Polling consistently finds voters trusting Democrats more<\/a> on health care, which almost certainly has something to do with the fact that every time Republicans try to scale back health care programs, conversation turns to what they are proposing as an alternative.<\/p>\n

And at that point, it always becomes clear the GOP alternative will mean fewer people with insurance.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

THAT\u2019S CERTAINLY THE CASE NOW. The big health care cuts<\/a> Republicans passed over the summer to finance their tax cuts are going to leave 10 million people newly uninsured<\/a>, according to projections. Failure to renew the extended Affordable Care Act subsidies now would leave another 4 million uninsured<\/a>. Polls show even Republican voters don\u2019t want that to happen.<\/p>\n

In many ways this is a replay of the debate<\/a> that took place in 2017, when Trump and the Republicans spent most of his first year in office trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act outright\u2014only to see poll numbers for both themselves and their cause plummet as voters realized that the GOP alternative on offer sounded much worse than what existed already.<\/p>\n

And that fight was in some ways more politically favorable to Republicans than the one taking place today, in the shutdown fight. The people who would feel the impact of premium hikes if the subsidy boost lapses are<\/a> disproportionately<\/a> from red states and congressional districts\u2014and include large numbers of both farmers<\/a> and small business owners<\/a>, both of whom are traditionally Republican constituencies.<\/p>\n

That probably explains why, according to polling<\/a>, 57 percent of self-identifying MAGA supporters want Republicans to keep the extra subsidies going. The Affordable Care Act is making a difference in their lives, as it is for so many millions of others\u2014which may or may not qualify as a big success, but certainly doesn\u2019t sound like a failure.<\/p>\n

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