Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, said Democrats’ position in the standoff amounts to shutting down the government over “Obamacare subsidies for the wealthy.”
The subsidies were first expanded under President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, and later extended through the Inflation Reduction Act. They are set to expire on December 31, 2025.
Democrats argue that allowing the subsidies to lapse would cause many Americans to lose health coverage. Critics, however, contend the enhanced assistance primarily benefits higher-income households rather than those most in need.
“What the enhanced subsidies do is they subsidize people making from $129,000 all the way up to $600,000 per year. And so these are really the Obamacare subsidies for the wealthy,” Cannon told Breitbart News.
“The part that offends people is that Obamacare is still so unaffordable that people earning $129,000, $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year still can’t afford it — and that’s why the government is subsidizing them,” he added.
“The most important kind of assistance we can provide to people who are having a hard time affording health insurance is to get all the Obamacare regulations out of the way. Because if you do that, then premiums will plummet by 50 to 60 percent for most people in the Exchanges,” he continued.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimated that the Democratic counterproposal to the Republican stopgap spending bill — which calls for permanently extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies — would increase the national debt by $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
“If lawmakers want to extend any of the ACA subsidies, they should do so responsibly by targeting the extension and at least offsetting the costs. Ideally we should be offsetting new borrowing twice over,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement.
“Plenty of options are available, from adopting site-neutral payments to reducing Medicare Advantage upcoding to funding Cost Sharing Reduction payments,” MacGuineas noted further.
“Meanwhile, if lawmakers want to pare back parts of the reconciliation law, they should focus on the $6 trillion in tax cuts and spending increases, not the payfors,” she said. “We should be able to keep the government’s lights on without making our devastating fiscal situation even worse.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, was laughed off the podium this week after dismissing a New York Times poll showing that Americans blame Democrats for the government shutdown.
The unusual scene unfolded just before the shutdown officially began, when Senate Democrats rejected a continuing resolution passed by the House.
“Now I know the leader is going to show a poll that says that Democrats will be blamed for the shutdown,” Schumer said, referring to the New York Times/Siena College survey. “There are many more polls that show Republicans are blamed. The question in that poll is biased.”
“In the New York Times, but it’s biased,” he continued, prompting Republicans across the chamber to erupt into laughter. “I don’t always believe the New York Times … You can be sure of that. Neither do you.”
Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have pushed the Trump administration to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits and guarantee taxpayer-funded health care “for all.” Republicans and the White House rejected the proposals, saying Democrats were demanding taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants.
“If you look at the original they did with this negotiation, it was a $1.5 trillion spending package, basically saying the American people want to give massive amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars to illegal aliens for their health care, while Americans are struggling to pay their health care bills,” Vice President JD Vance said following a White House meeting with congressional leaders.
