Chucky Schumer continues to extort the country and the GOP as he seeks to raid the fisc by demanding a one-year extension of those ridiculously generous enhanced ACA subsidies that the Democrats originally assured everyone were supposed to be a "temporary" covid-relief measure that they wanted to expire by year-end.
In Washington DC you are allowed to "fail up". If a government program turns into a giant clusterfuck, you don't shut it down or replace it or even reform it. You just reward failure by throwing MORE taxpayer money at it! That's the Dem philosophy. Along with "never let a good crisis go to waste" - in this case, Covid-19 was the crisis. Pretend your bailout is only TEMPORARY, but then when it's due to expire you hold the federal government hostage to making it PERMANENT.
Here's some good background reading:
https://cei.org/blog/the-problem-wit...-is-obamacare/ Originally Posted by lustylad
In 2009, a family of 4 that made less than $125,000 got a tax credit to help pay the premium. What Biden did in 2021 was increase the maximum number so that a family of 4 that made more than $125,000 would be eligible for a tax credit to help pay for the premium. The tax credits for higher income people were suppose to expire 12/31/2025. Senator Chuck is trying to get these tax credits extended for at least another year. This is the latest compromise that he has offered. Originally Posted by adav8s28The problem is that health care expenditures in the USA are 18% of GDP. That's much higher than any other country. The next highest in the OECD, Germany, clocks in at about 12.5%. Ireland at 7%. And we're not getting what we're paying for. The USA is 55th in the world in terms of life expectancy, behind Panama, Albania, and Costa Rica among many others.
The "temporary" changes to the ACA that are the subject of the dispute would provide tax credits, paid directly to insurers, to every American, regardless of income, who would pay over 8.5% of his income in health insurance for a silver plan. You do have some out of pocket payments when you're on Obamacare, but including those you'll end up paying maybe 9% to 12% of your adjusted gross income for health care, according to ChatGPT.
So, in other words, health care expenditures are 18% of GDP. But the maximum people will actually pay for their health care, including insurance, is 12%. Some, particularly those on Medicare and Medicaid and company-provided insurance, pay much less.
The government pays the Obamacare tax credits directly to the insurance companies. Do the insurance companies have any motivation to keep costs down? Well, yes. That will improve their bottom lines. But they have even more motivation to raise their premiums and grab more money from Uncle Sam. This is like government support for higher education through easy-to-get loans to students that later will presumably be forgiven. That enabled colleges to raise their tuitions sky high.
Stephen Moore was on CSPAN the other day, and he said all Americans should be covered by major medical insurance. And for non catastrophic medical care, they should pay out of pocket. Then they'd have the motivation to shop around. The free market would work. Costs would come down a lot. Hospitals and providers would have to compete on price.
You could marry Moore's idea to something like mandated HSA accounts, like what Singapore does, where employers and individuals mostly fund the accounts. You can withdraw money from your HSA investment account to pay for medical care. Singapore's health care expenditures are 5.6% of GDP, less than 1/3rd of the USA's, and life expectancy is 8th highest in the world.
So why don't the political parties do something? Why is there a shutdown? Well, Blackman knows more about Democratic Party politics than anyone here. He says Democrats have the motivation to draw the shutdown out as long as possible, because it will help them at the polls. Schumer's idea, to extend the credits for higher income taxpayers for a year, would fortuitously bring this issue to a head again just in time for the 2026 midterm elections, which would play into Democrats' hands. As to the Republican Party, a lot of the Congressmen and Senators correctly recognize the problem, but they're too busy addressing more important issues, like which bathroom shemales should use.
