By Liz Peek
The government shutdown will end soon. How do I know? Because whatever political advantage Democrats had a few weeks ago by “standing strong!” and “confronting Trump!” is quickly evaporating. When the polls flip, so will the party that has lost its way.
Voters have a way of sniffing out the truth. They are beginning to understand that Democrats are rudderless and are voting to keep the government closed out of confusion, not conviction.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and their colleagues claim they desperately want Obamacare premium subsidies extended, but they have not been holding talks with Republicans, the majority party, to make that happen. They have no proposal on the table that would incorporate a subsidy extension into next year’s budget.
They have, in short, no plan.
Meanwhile, although it was smart to target health care as the battleground for their resistance efforts — Democrats traditionally poll better than Republicans on that issue — the conversation has gone awry. Americans have read, maybe for the first time, just how heavily taxpayers have been subsidizing Obamacare premiums. The numbers are shocking and sow doubt about the program’s viability.
The Affordable Care Act was meant to make health insurance more affordable; it turns out that, without the huge subsidies tacked on during the pandemic, it is not affordable for many people. Should they expire, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, premiums would more than double next year.
The program was also expected to lead to universal coverage; Obamacare was going to be so great, Dems thought, that everyone in the country could finally be covered. The fact that only 24 million people, or about 7 percent of the country, are covered by ACA plans stuns those who remember that original premise. Even worse, 27 million people — 8 percent of the population — remain uninsured, eclipsing the number insured on the ACA exchanges.
What went wrong? Obamacare was flawed from the start. The idea was that, if everyone who didn’t have insurance was forced to buy into the government-provided program, the risk pool would be broad and costs low. But it turned out that it is not constitutional to require citizens to buy a commercial product. The so-called individual mandate was therefore dropped, and a great many healthy young people failed to sign up.
The result was an older, sicker pool and higher coverage costs. Some insurance companies dropped out as mandates to cover pre-existing conditions and other requirements made the program unprofitable.
Op-Ed Continues Over at The Hill:
Government shutdown exposes Democrats' Obamacare woes https://t.co/3Pdqn1tx94
— Liz Peek (@lizpeek) October 24, 2025
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