In a post to Truth Social on Saturday, President Donald Trump recommended to Senate Republicans that Obamacare subsidies be sent to the American people rather than insurance companies.
Trump said eliminating subsidies from Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act, would give people greater control over their healthcare and enable them to find better options and keep more of their money. (RELATED: 13 Years Later, Obamacare ‘Failed To Deliver’ On Key Promises)
“In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare,” he added.
This post comes after Democrats have blocked Republicans’ funding measure to open the government 14 times, demanding the extension of COVID-era Obamacare premium subsidies set to expire at the end of 2025. They said that allowing the subsidies to expire would increase healthcare costs, even going as far as to accuse Republicans of trying to “gut the healthcare of everyday Americans.” (RELATED: LARRY ELDER: The Politics Of The Shutdown, Obamacare, Crime And Deportations)
Obamacare established premium tax credits to help people purchase insurance through public marketplaces if they don’t have other coverage. At first, these subsidies were only available to families earning between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level.
Former President Joe Biden, however, expanded the program through the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. These changes removed the income limit and increased how much the government helps pay for premiums, in some instances even lowering certain families’ costs to zero. Democrats passed these expansions without Republican support and set them to expire at the end of 2025. Now, as those subsidies are set to end, Democrats are blaming Republicans for the potential premium increases that would result from the expiration timeline they originally approved.
Critics of Obamacare, among them former Trump economic advisor Stephen Moore, argue that the main beneficiaries of the subsidies are insurance companies, such as UnitedHealth, Blue Cross, and Humana, to the tune of $30 – $50 billion dollars. The health industry’s stock, he went on to say, has risen four times faster than average stock indexes since Obamacare’s inception in 2010.
report from the conservative Paragon Health Institute on Nov. 6 said that these Obamacare subsidies punish work, disadvantage those with employer-provided insurance, and push employers to drop coverage altogether. According to the report, Obamacare set up backward incentives by making subsidies available only to those without employer health plans, leading some people to avoid jobs that included insurance.
“Lower- and lower-middle-income enrollees obtain much greater benefit if they do not receive coverage at work and instead enroll in exchange coverage. In other words, workers face a large penalty if they receive health insurance through their employers rather than through the exchanges,” Paragon argued in their report. “This design distorts labor market decisions, encouraging people to opt for jobs or work arrangements that do not provide coverage simply to qualify for larger subsidies.”
Moore also said insurance companies make billions because Americans have more coverage than they need. He suggests that if people only had catastrophic plans for serious illnesses or accidents, healthcare costs would drop.
“If every American simply had a catastrophic coverage plan that would avoid families going bankrupt due to cancer or a terrible accident, we could simply pay our routine health bills the way we pay for rent or groceries — and then cut out the insurance middleman,” Moore said. “This would immediately bring a stop to the stampeding costs of healthcare services, because patients would be selective about what services cost while doctors and hospitals could no longer pass costs on to third party insurers.”
