Free Republic

Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that the Trump administration may look at multiple options for extending health care subsidies that are due to expire soon.A key issue that kept the government shut down for more than a month was the COVID-19 pandemic-era health care subsidies that will expire at the end of the year. Democrats in Congress had wanted to add an extension to a stopgap bill to fund the government, but did not succeed in that effort.“The president’s willing to look at all options,” Oz said on Sunday during an interview...

Lawmakers are racing toward a mid-December deadline, with Republicans hoping to present side-by-side legislation with Democrats’ plan to extend ACA subsidies.President Donald Trump has again promised a “far better and far less expensive” alternative to the Affordable Care Act, and Republicans are rushing — again — to deliver one.For weeks throughout the longest government shutdown in history, Trump avoided negotiating with Democrats on the health care concerns fueling their standoff. Now lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are speeding toward a self-imposed deadline of mid-December to hold dueling health care votes.Democrats maintain the simplest and most popular option is...

While a number of industrialized nations provide health care through a single payer (government run) system, others have made a public-private system the model they use to guarantee health services to all their citizens. One of those nations is Israel which (as it turns out) has a lot to teach the United States on how to operate a universal health system that is based on both private and public inputs. Israel adopted its national health system in 1995 requiring all permanent residents be provided a standard basket of services including physician care, hospitalization, prescription drugs and dental care for children...

The right’s warnings about Obamacare proved prescient, yet Democrats keep doubling down on a failing system they refuse to admit they broke. Just over 15 years ago, when the Democrat-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate were debating the healthcare proposals offered by the Democrat president, nearly everyone on the political right was unified in opposition. It may well have been the last time the right was united on anything, but it was indeed unified and resolute. Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (MN) warned that “This monstrosity of a bill will not only destroy the private healthcare market, it will lead to massive...

A monumental historic opportunity will be presented to Trump and the GOP – if they have the guts to seize it. While the common perception of the six-week-long government shutdown is that Republicans won and Democrats lost, the Dems did manage to squeeze one notable concession from the GOP. In return for the votes of eight Democratic Senators to reopen the government, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) promised to bring the reauthorization of COVID-era Obamacare insurance subsidies to a vote in December. And while Republicans have no appetite to further bankroll a program they have unanimously opposed for the...

The federal government has reopened following President Trump’s signing of a bipartisan spending package passed by Congress. The action ends the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Last night, the House of Representatives voted 222 to 209 to give final approval to the funding measure. The Senate began clearing the way on Monday, when eight Senate Democrats crossed party lines in a vote that opened the door for the government to resume operations. Their votes came with a promise from Senate leadership to allow a future vote on extending Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies—which currently reimburse insurance plans that include...

I'm old enough to remember when the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) passed. It was 2010, and I had just joined Twitter the previous fall while I was on maternity leave following the birth of my second son. That means I recall exactly how Obamacare's passage unfolded. It was forced on an unwilling American people by the Democrats, who shoved it through Congress without a single Republican vote. Many people, myself included, warned it was a bait-and-switch scheme that wouldn't lower healthcare costs but would usher in single-payer socialized medicine. Now that we're facing another negotiation on Obamacare subsidies, it's time...

The 42-day federal shutdown forced by Democrats thrust the economics of Obamacare into the limelight, and exposed an uncomfortable truth: An insurance industry whose executives are increasingly liberal donors has seen its earnings soar with the injection of taxpayer-funded subsidies that propped up Barack Obama's signature health program from collapse. The nation’s largest health insurance companies have seen good business since Obamacare was first passed in 2010 and fully implemented in 2014. This has come in no small part because of federal government subsidies to the insurance industry, which government estimates show totaled $1.8 trillion in 2023 alone. Those subsidies...

VIDEOOne upside of the Schumer Shutdown is that it has refocused attention on the FAILED Obamacare which was the reason why the Democrats shut down the government. They shut it down because the grotesquely misnamed AFFORDABLE Care Act is most definitely NOT affordable as Scott Jennings has pointed out and they wanted more government subsidies for it including for illegal aliens. In fact, Obamacare was NOT designed to be affordable in the first place. It was just an insurance industry enrichment SCAM designed to get it passed by Congress. And do you know who else agrees with Scott Jennings that...

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would not commit Monday when CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed him on bringing a vote to the floor to address health care affordability before the ACA tax subsidies expire. The eight Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the continuing resolution Sunday night to help reopen the government did so with the belief that Republicans would begin healthcare talks. Under President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act, tax subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year and cause premiums to skyrocket. “The problem is when you’re subsidizing insurance companies, they just jack the...

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is pushing back on the idea that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare, has made health insurance costs more affordable, saying, “Obamacare makes everyone else poor.”Lee shared a graphic, first posted by President Trump on Truth social, showing how major health insurance company stocks have performed since the ACA was enacted in 2010 to November 2025.The seven major health insurance companies depicted on the graph show gains of anywhere from 414% to 1177% in their stock prices between March 2010 and November 2025.Health insurance companies are making money hand over fist—not because they’ve discovered...

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, walked off the Senate floor when being questioned about reopening the federal government during the longest shutdown in history. Schumer admitted to Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-OH, that he didn’t have a written proposal to fix the Affordable Care Act. “We can’t give you a counter in writing, but it’s very simple," Schumer said. "Because we have two sentences we would add to any proposal which would extend the ACA benefits for one year. Moreno exposed that the Affordable Care Act imposed no income caps, meaning people who make millions of dollars a year...

It’s been over 15 years since Democrats passed Obamacare under the promise that it would make healthcare affordable. Americans were supposed to save money, keep their doctors, and finally get a system that worked for them instead of the big insurance companies. Today, those promises look like a sick joke. A recent post shared by our sister site Twitchy highlights how the Obamacare boondoggle really works, and why it doesn’t actually work for the people. Instead, it was built to enrich the healthcare industry, and the numbers prove it. Let me give you a rundown of how it works, if...

In a long vote made longer by Texas Senator John Cornyn's absence from D.C. until late Sunday night, a new funding bill has passed the U.S. Senate and heads for the House of Representatives.The deal, which got support from eight Democrats, is part of a package meant to reopen the government, fund SNAP benefits, begin the appropriations process, and even secure a future vote for extending Affordable Care Act subsidies. The text of the bill can be found here.What's in the Deal?In exchange for their support of a bill to re-open the federal government, the seven Democrats were promised a...

With the government shutdown rolling on without an end in sight and the Obamacare subsidies running out, President Donald Trump is sizing up a long-running battle against the failures of the Affordable Care Act. "OBAMACARE 'SUCKS," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday morning. "THE WORST HEALTHCARE FOR THE HIGHEST PRICE." On Saturday, Trump floated a compromise amid the impasse on the shutdown, urging Republicans to redirect federal money that goes to health insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act and send it directly to individuals. "PAY THE PEOPLE, NOT THE INSURANCE COMPANIES!" Trump wrote in a message that could...

By punting the issue into 2025, Democrats hoped they could secure a permanent extension of Obamacare subsidies. That plan backfired.In response to the government shutdown hitting the one-month mark, an unnamed adviser to Donald Trump said that the president has “had it with these people [i.e., congressional Democrats], because he knows they’re playing politics.” He’s right — but the administration hasn’t articulated the half of it.Democrats have shut down the government due to their demands that Republicans extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies set to expire on Dec. 31. Such a demand would give a bailout to insurance companies totaling $350 billion...

Next week my firm will hold its annual health insurance information meeting. The news won’t be good. Premiums are expected to increase 10-15% after increasing a similar amount last year. If only my 401(k) could grow like that! The bottom line is that my paycheck will become smaller and my health care costs will become larger. My wife and I have also spent most of this year scurrying through the endless maze of our byzantine and befuddling health care system. Our journey began when my wife’s father had a stroke in April… Over the past seven months we have had...

"When I talk about weak Republican men, I am pretty much talking oftentimes about the leadership in the House and Senate, and they are just not getting our agenda done," she said. In recent weeks, Greene has pushed for her own party to share an alternative plan to replace the current Affordable Care Act, specifically calling out House Speaker Mike Johnson. "Republicans never fixed it … And then the ACA tax credits were passed in 2021 … and Republicans never made a plan for that," Greene said. She criticized Johnson for keeping the House in recess, saying, "We should be...

David Delfiner and Lisa Parsons received a shocking letter from their health insurance provider when they checked their mail last week. Their monthly health insurance cost will increase from $350 a month this year to $2,221 starting in 2026. “It’s insane. It’s unbelievable,” said Parsons, a 59-year-old retiree living in South Lake Tahoe. The couple is not alone as open enrollment begins and 1.7 million Californians are facing an average 97% surge in premiums for next year’s health insurance plans available on the open marketplace. Covered California, the state’s health care exchange, expects prices to increase 10% on average for...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago was scrambling to close a $369 million deficit in 2013. The inception of ObamaCare offered an enticing target for cost shaving: retiree health coverage. The city expected to spend $194 million that year subsidizing health insurance for its retirees, many of whom were too young to qualify for Medicare. Such costs were projected to increase to $540 million by 2023 at the same time as pension payments were ballooning. While courts in Illinois and other states have held that public employee pensions are legally protected, governments have more latitude to make changes to medical benefits....