The strangest thing about the recent shutdown fight in Congress is that a quarrel ostensibly about health-care subsidies failed to stir any real debate about health-care reform. Washington prefers not to open that can of worms. The fact remains, this system\u2019s defects weren\u2019t just the proximate cause of the past month\u2019s paralysis. They also help drive the country\u2019s deeper political and fiscal dysfunction.<\/p>\n
Democrats refused to keep the government running unless so-called enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies \u2014 introduced in 2021 in response to the pandemic and scheduled to expire at the end of this year \u2014 were extended. Letting the additional subsidies disappear would raise the cost of insurance for many Americans and impose especially steep increases<\/a> on families making between 400% and 500% of the poverty line (that is, between $129,000 and $161,000).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The strangest thing about the recent shutdown fight in Congress is that a quarrel ostensibly about health-care subsidies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[4558,308,1523,103,397,396,61,60,79593,11509,1650,11504,11505,11510,1519,3591],"class_list":{"0":"post-137789","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-congress","9":"tag-design","10":"tag-government","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-health-care","13":"tag-healthcare","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-marjorie-taylor","17":"tag-obamacare","18":"tag-politics","19":"tag-u-s-democrats","20":"tag-u-s-republicans","21":"tag-view","22":"tag-washington","23":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}