The Unholy Obamacare Alliance Driving the Government Shutdown

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There is an age-old story behind the record-long federal government shutdown that is not receiving nearly enough attention. It involves multibillion-dollar health insurance corporations, Democratic lawmakers, and the failure of Obamacare.

 

The shutdown and all the pain it is causing continues because Senate Democrats are steadfastly maintaining their filibuster and refusing to join the Republican House in passing a clean spending bill. They say they won’t yield until Republicans agree to extend Obamacare health insurance subsidies — but what is their real intention?

 

Here’s what they’re not telling us: history shows the subsidies they’re demanding don’t help American families. They go straight into the overflowing pockets of the nation’s largest insurers — United, Aetna, Cigna, and others — which stand to rake in $350 billion over the next decade if the subsidies are extended, all while raising Americans’ premiums and making it harder to get care through endless prior authorizations, denials, and limited coverage.

 

This underscores how badly Obamacare has failed the American people. Today, households are paying, on average, $26,000 annually for health coverage that, all too often, doesn’t cover the care they need. And Democrats are continually telling us that this system won’t work at all unless taxpayers continue to give a king’s ransom to the big health insurers. Consequently, the largest health insurers have collected more than $370 billion in profits since Barack Obama signed this awful bill into law. As they collect these profits, they continue to increase premiums and limit coverage.

 

How does this make any sense?

 

This broken system continues because of the devil’s alliance between insurers and Democratic politicians, even as nonpartisan watchdog organizations have identified more than one trillion — yes, trillion — dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse that could help reopen Washington. Just follow the money. Here’s one glaring example. No organization does more to get Democrats elected to office than AARP. Last year the largest insurance company, UnitedHealth, gave AARP $9 billion to attach its name to United’s Medicare policies. 

 

In fact, 68% of all health insurance company political contributions go to Democrats. It’s no surprise, then, that they’re willing to shut down the government to keep the money flowing to their well-heeled benefactors.

 

It’s time to use this moment to bring this ripoff of the American people to an end. We need a health care system that utilizes genuine competition and consumer choice to bring premiums down and make coverage better. Obamacare has failed to achieve those objectives. Let’s replace it with free enterprise principles that deliver value to consumers, small business owners and taxpayers.

 

The federal government is shut down today because of the self-serving partnership between Democrats and mega insurance companies. Giving them what they want would be a multibillion-dollar mistake.