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.
Promised changes, such as tort reform and allowing insurers to compete across state lines, never materialized. And problems with America’s health care system — like too few people having “skin in the game” — have persisted. In fact, the Obamacare subsidies make that issue worse, by cutting the required contribution percentages across the board, thereby reducing enrollees’ out-of-pocket costs.
The real costs of Obamacare insurance have been masked by escalating subsidies, which were inflated during the pandemic but are set to expire at the end of this year. Democrats want those subsidies extended, even though the expected cost is nearly half a trillion dollars over the coming decade — and even though much of the benefit would go to higher-income Americans.
There will most likely be some accommodation, because Republican as well as Democratic legislators will be held accountable if premiums soar without the subsidies. But it won’t happen unless the government is first reopened and budget talks continue. That is what Democrats are refusing to do, in effect creating the very crisis they are railing about.
Here’s the bigger problem for Democrats: Obamacare is their program. They passed it into being with zero GOP votes or input. As Nancy Pelosi famously quipped, dismissing Republican outrage over such consequential legislation being railroaded through Congress, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” It was exactly the kind of authoritarian “my way or the highway” move Democrats accuse President Trump of making on a routine basis.
For them to rail now about how catastrophic the premiums will be without subsidies is beyond ironic.
Meanwhile, Democrats don’t seem to be making many friends with their Schumer shutdown. A recent AP-NORC poll showed that roughly 3 in 10 U.S. adults have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Democratic Party, unchanged from September, before the shutdown. By comparison, four in 10 have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Republican Party. That doesn’t look like winning.
Earlier in the dispute, voters blamed Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown. A Washington Post poll on Oct. 1 put the blame gap at 17 points, with 47 percent holding Trump and the GOP responsible and only 30 percent pointing the finger at Democrats. A House Democratic Caucus Internal survey from Oct. 22 shows a narrower 5-point difference, with Democrats still having the edge, but narrower.
Polling by right-leaning McLaughlin and Associates shows that likely voters in eight all-important toss-up House districts are blaming Democrats for the shutdown, by a margin of three points. As next year’s midterm elections loom large, Democrats are bound to be hyper-focused on those competitive districts, which could make or break their chances of regaining the majority in the House.
Not surprisingly, in the McLaughlin survey, a majority wanted Congress to fix the subsidy issue. They want Democrats, who have now voted more than a dozen times against re-opening the government, to get back on the job and fix the problem.
It didn’t help Democrats’ cause to have one of their own, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), admit to Fox News that “Shutdowns are terrible and, of course, there will be families that are going to suffer.” She added piously, “We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have.”
Oops. That’s called saying the quiet part out loud. Voters are unlikely to be impressed.
Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company.
