Both New Hampshire U.S. senators voted yet again on Monday to keep the federal government shutdown, using the Senate’s filibuster rule to block a continuing resolution that would maintain current spending.
Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen say that forcing Republicans to agree to a side deal keeping taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies is more important than keeping the government open.
At a healthcare roundtable in Newmarket on Monday, Hassan told attendees, according to the Portsmouth Herald, that “though a government shutdown hurts federal workers, the public and the economy, Hassan said Democrats’ fight in Washington was worth it.”
“It’s not good to have the government closed,” Hassan said. “But it also is not good to have health care premiums for so many of our friends and neighbors skyrocket like this.”
Shaheen has also made it clear she’s withholding her vote over Obamacare subsidies. The same with her would-be replacement, U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas, who also supports the shutdown.
So, how did we get here? According to Shaheen, at the end of the year, “we’re going to see about 24 million people who are going to see their insurance premiums double. As a result, approximately 4 million people are expected to lose their health insurance because they will be unable to afford the additional costs.”
But why? Why are 24 million Americans on this end-of-year Obamacare clock?
Because Jeanne Shaheen voted for it.
So did Maggie Hassan, Chris Pappas, and every Democrat who voted to pass what the liberal Washington Post calls the “misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).”
In the waning days of the COVID pandemic, President Joe Biden and the then-Democrat-controlled Congress pushed through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) on a party-line vote. The $1.9 trillion that Democrats spent in the spring of 2021 included billions to temporarily increase subsidies for people using the Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”) to buy health insurance.
That included raising the eligibility for taxpayer-funded subsidies to 400 percent of the federal poverty line. As a result, a family of four earning more than $125,000 a year could temporarily, during the COVID emergency, get taxpayer subsidies.
These “temporary, emergency” dollars were scheduled to expire at the end of 2022, returning Obamacare to its (already expensive) pre-COVID levels. But Democrats again used their majority to push through the IRA and, with it, an extension of the subsidies until the end of 2o25.
Interestingly, the misnamed IRA was a 10-year spending plan. And yet the Obamacare subsidies sunset after just three years. Again–why?
As The Wall Street Journal points out, “Democrats set a 2025 expiration date to make the Inflation Reduction Act look less expensive over a 10-year budget window.” They just assumed that once the spending started, it would never stop.
That is the budget trickery Hassan, Pappas, and Shaheen all voted for. And now that their trick has been exposed, they’re holding government funding hostage until billions more are pulled out of the taxpayers’ hat.
Republicans say they’ll negotiate a deal on the new Obamacare spending after the government reopens. Democrats say that’s not good enough.
But what nobody is talking about is how expensive these healthcare giveaways are for a national already $38 trillion in debt.
Once again, the liberal Washington Post. “The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable.”
“Democrats have demanded that Republicans agree to extend the COVID-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it,” the newspaper’s editors added. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates this will cost $350 billion over the next decade.”
During an interview with NHPR last week, Shaheen let some of the real math slip out. “We know that about 94 percent of people who are receiving that help to pay for their health insurance earn less than $200,000 a year.”
Really? How many taxpayers “knew” that people earning $200k were getting free healthcare money? Or $150,000? Or even $100,000?
Should Americans earning $60,000 a year and paying for their own insurance be forced to subsidize self-employed people earning twice as much? Is that really worth shutting down the government?
New Hampshire’s federal delegation thinks so. And as long as the taxpayers go along, there’s no reason for them to end their holdout and let the government reopen.
