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Ever since the disaster of Obamacare was unleashed on the American public, our healthcare system has only gotten worse – except for the insurance companies, who bathed in massive profits thanks to their pal Obama. Some health insurance stocks are up 1,000 percent in the last 15 years, and even Obama’s cheerleaders at the New York Times called Obamacare a “blessing”!
This puts in the last piece of the puzzle as to why the Democrats dug in their heels so much on the longest shutdown in American history. The Democrats’ insistence on extending Obamacare subsidies is not some principled stand on behalf of any huddled masses yearning to breathe free: this is obstructionism to feed their donors’ profits.
The “follow the money” on this one is pretty straightforward. In the 2024 campaign, insurers gave five times more money to Kamala Harris than to Donald Trump. In the 2018 cycle, the industry gave 30 times as much to federal Democrat candidates as Republicans: $63 million to just $2.2 million.
This is the Democrats’ new playbook: pretend to champion the oppressed while cashing checks from the oppressors. Congressional Democrats were repaying their corporate donors by shutting down the government to keep $400 billion of taxpayer money flowing to insurance companies in Obamacare subsidies. Then of course that money comes back into Democrats’ coffers and the awful cycle keeps going.
Insurance companies are betting that Democrats take the House next year, meaning it will be even easier to perpetuate this broken system.
What may surprise you is that these enhanced subsidies were not part of the original legislation. Rather, these billions were sold as temporary COVID enhanced subsidies, and now Democrats and their insurance company overlords are trying to make them permanent. According to the nonpartisan Paragon Health Institute, the COVID enhanced subsidies make all the underlying problems with the original subsidies even worse. Insurers reportedly have been enrolling people without their knowledge in order to squeeze more cash out of the federal government, figuring that the system is so big they can get away with anything – and if anyone notices, they’ll shriek, “Won’t somebody please think of the children!”
Looking at the Medicare Advantage Plans, you can see insurance companies overbilling by as much as $2 trillion in the next eight years, according to Federal auditors. Profit hungry companies like UnitedHealthcare are facing a federal investigation about their Medicare overbilling, which would threaten those eye-watering Obamacare profits. No wonder United, the biggest Obamacare insurer, donated $9 billion to AARP to help them keep the wheels as greased as possible. Imagine how many lives could have been saved or improved if that $9 billion had been spent helping patients in their retirement years?
While this “principled stand” may help Democrats squeeze more money from insurance companies, it has not helped their popularity. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer broke the record for most unpopular national figure in the last 40 years of polling.
If Republicans do indeed agree to extend the COVID Obamacare subsidies, this olive leaf should come with the condition that insurers must pay for the privilege. They can certainly afford it.
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