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
This paragraph is from your link:
However, once Obamacare went into effect, premiums increased substantially. Now, around half of people at the income cutoff wouldn’t be able to afford insurance, according to the ACA’s affordability standard, and would deserve subsidies under the original Obamacare framework. The increase in premiums between 2009 and 2025 is most evident for people older than 50, which is why Democrats’ examples of unaffordability frequently include these individuals.
The author of the link fails to mention that the ACA law has changed a little from 2009. The individual mandate to purchase health insurance was removed. By removing the individual mandate, some healthy people stopped buying health insurance on the government exchanges (HealthCare.Gov). This leads to an unbalanced risk pool. When you don't have a balanced risk pool the health insurance company won't be able to make a profit (too many sick people submitting claims). The health insurance company will ask for a premium rate increase for the states that they lost money in. Rate increases have to be approved by the Commissioner of Insurance of each state.
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.
Republican Congresswoman MTG has relatives that are on Obamacare. She claims to not be a fan of Obamacare but supports having the Biden tax credits extended.
Bottom line by removing the individual mandate the law has had problems that the original designers of the legislation could not anticipate.
Group Health Insurance thru the employer does not have this problem. The risk pool is always balanced. You have mostly younger healthy employees in the risk pool. This tends to be the case especially for a company that has more than 10,000 employees.
HRC had proposed a solution that never went anywhere. That was once you hit age 55 you are eligible for Medicare. Medicare is a true single payer system. Current law you have be age 65 before you are eligible.