I don't understand how this confers political benefit to the republicans or the white house. Can somebody explain a non conspiracy model how this helps them electorally running into the midterms?
Is there some way aside from the obvious mistruths they can demonstrate its the democrats fault, and achieve some electoral advantage?
Wyoming is extremely "red" according to Web searches (I am not an american)
My default assumption here is, it cannot, and this is going to cost them seats.
I’m right-leaning, I agree it does not help Republicans.
Also, propping up ACA ( I say this as an ACA user ) is not the answer, either. The subsidies were temporary, making them permanent only adds to the never ending flood of red ink.
Healthcare needs a complete reboot. As someone on the right, I am open to a reasonable big government solution. ( After all, even Nixon wanted public healthcare. ).
It’s long past the time for patching. We need a reboot.
AKA the typical doomer non-solution. 'If we blow it up, somehow a new, better systems will magically emerge'.
If I went to management with the dev plan of 'throw all the source away, start over with a new stack, new devs, from scratch, but also I don't know what the new stack will be, and haven't found new devs' I would be called a moron. But if you are a conservative, it's somehow called rational policy and a plan and it's worth the lifetime lasting damage/potential deaths is will cause a shit ton of people and financial ruin it will cause many.
Edit: Throttled so replying by edit. In the example below, Steve Jobs LITERALLY had a stack in mind, a plan, and people/talent lined up.
I think nobody believes that now. Healthcare is broken. It’s time to make things better, not patch the termite infected boat one more time.
Remember the bold spirit of ‘we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it’? If you think ACA is better than what preceded it, then you favor bold steps.
How long have the Republicans said the ACA has to go, yet they don't even have the IDEA of a plan? There was an ACTUAL written ACA when the quote you use was said. There is ZERO actual written plan on the Republican side today. The comparison doesn't make sense.
I favor logical progress. I don't favor 'blow it up so magic can do it's work'.
Unless you were Steve Jobs in late 90s Apple, when in fact they did have to throw all the source away, start over with a new stack and new devs, with imported ideas, not exactly knowing what the outcome would be like. Then you wouldn't be a moron, you'd be hailed as a business genius (I mean NeXTStep->macOS).
US healthcare is broken. Most attempts to fix it make it worse because they don't address the root causes. That doesn't mean everyone who points it out needs to present a 300 page plan for how to address it.
So other than Jobs having a plan, having a proven dev culture that he himself built up, having a production OS, he had nothing?
Not everyone needs to have a 300 page plan, but the Steve Jobs/Politicians pushing to blow things up need to. Or in Job's case he started with way, way, more than just a 300 page plan.
> Also, propping up ACA ( I say this as an ACA user ) is not the answer, either. The subsidies were temporary, making them permanent only adds to the never ending flood of red ink.
It does not add to the red ink, at least according to the accounting rules Republicans used to justify the so-called Big Beautiful Bill's (BBB) costs.
The BBB made many of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which were temporary and set to expire at the end of 2025 (just like enhanced ACA subsidies), permanent.
Republicans argued that the loss of revenue from making the tax cuts permanent should not count when accessing the effects of the BBB on the deficit because extending something that is expiring doesn't really change anything.
Yes, a "reboot" is needed. A bit of history from what I remember:
Nixon's plan would have passed except for Ted Kennedy, he stopped it in its tracks. Then when the Clintons came in something flipped, the GOP was all against what Hillary was trying to push. I forgot what it was but I think it was some kind of single payer.
So under Obama, the democrats took the Massachusetts plan created by Romney (GOP), which I believe the Heritage Foundation even endorsed, thus created the ACA.
So here we are. Now I think we are in a sad place where for-profit healthcare is entrenched, bribing both side of the aisle to keep their profits high.
> I forgot what it was but I think it was some kind of single payer.
It was not, despite universal single payer having, at the time, outright majority support in polling. That’s one reason it lacked popular support on either side of the political spectrum.
> So under Obama, the democrats took the Massachusetts plan created by Romney (GOP), which I believe the Heritage Foundation even endorsed, thus created the ACA.
IIRC, it wasn't created by Romney, it was created by the insurance lobby and became a (rhetorical) Republican alternative during the debate over the Clinton plan; once that was killed, the Republicans didn't push it nationally (though I think Bush briefly, maybe only during the campaign, pushed a similar mandate-and-subsidy plan that was restricted to only including High-Deductible plans tied to HSAs.)
Extremely red states don't care. They won't flip at all. And none of the districts are even remotely competitive. Only the primaries matter.
A cursory look says Wyoming has a population of ~580k and ~340k registered voters. The article says Wyoming has 46k people on ACA. Republicans win landslides in Wyoming (40%-50% margins) and 46k people is 12% of voters max (likely closer to ~4% at risk).
Thanks. So, the upside is saving money, at the expense of alienating poorer voters in (this example) a state where their majority is so big they don't care.
When people don’t have access reliable healthcare, they tend to use even more expensive (for society) options like emergency rooms and grey/black market. People who become disabled or die from lack of healthcare don’t tend to pay much in the way of taxes.
To my knowledge, legal protections against unpaid emergency room bills not leading to credit harm or debt collection exist only in California and New York. Also, emergency rooms are very limited in the care they dispense - they don't dispense chemotherapies.
> Individuals who were unemployed made roughly 2.5 times as many preventable emergency care visits as those who had a job (Figure 3).
> Lack of health insurance coverage was another factor that appeared to play a role in preventable ER visits.
> According to the study, individuals without health insurance had more preventable visits to the ER than those with health insurance (Figure 4).
> This suggests that uninsured individuals may not seek primary care for chronic conditions ahead of an urgent episode or they may rely on emergency rooms for general health care needs.
Congress is likely to flip for many reasons. This is just a drop in the bucket. Places like Wyoming aren't on the table. Republicans are in a jam because nobody can challenge Trump without being primaried.
The real problem for Trump and Republicans is they do great when Trump himself is actually on the ticket. That's his power. Unfortunately for him, he will never be on a ticket ever again. But he still holds considerable influence over primary voters. Primary voters don't win marginal States. Trump is a paper tiger but because of his control over primaries Republicans are trapped.
The US is bleeding out because its government spends so much more than its society can generate via taxes. Its has a debt of 38 trillion dollars. The subsidies were adding to that.
People who say "we'd like to give you free money but can't afford it" aren't motivated by ideology, they're motivated by the money not being there. Borrowing just delays the inevitable and makes it worse - it's literally stealing from children and it doesn't fix anything.
There are ways to fix US healthcare but adding ever more debt won't do it.
Whether or not that's true economically, the idea that what Trump is doing will affect that in any positive way is, at this point, not merely ludicrous, but actively in denial of reality.
He is blatantly cutting spending on the many in order to give more to the wealthy few. Especially himself.
>They want poor(er) people to hurt, so that rich people can have more. It really is as simple as that.
What about rest of Trump's policies? Are tariffs also a "so that rich people can have more" policy, contrary to the "globalization only benefit the rich" rhetoric of the 2000s?
No: they're based on a specific set of lies he was sold back in the 1980s. There's a particular guy (I'm afraid I don't recall his name) who has been banging the tariff drum and claiming that they're some kind of economic panacea, and he apparently caught Trump at a very pliant time.
(I've tried to find who it was again, but it's hard to search for simply "who convinced Trump that tariffs are a good idea?")
All indications show that this is absolutely terrible for republicans' self interest, and popularity. trump has gone from winning the popular vote ~~(over 50% voted for him)~~ (a plurality of 49.8% voted for him) to polling at the 30%s. The recent 2025 elections (an off-year, so a variety of smaller elections at the state / city level mostly) have shown democrats are absolutely performing much better right now. This is not contested by either party.
> Is there some way aside from the obvious mistruths they can demonstrate its the democrats fault, and achieve some electoral advantage?
You discount the skill republicans have at lying -- regardless, when people are feeling the pinch in their pockets, they will blame whoever is in power. Currently it is the republicans.
I think you probably need to consider how many and who is affected and where their voting affiliations already lie if they even vote at all.
My guess is this doesn’t help or hurt either party at the voting booth. If you are ACA aligned or participate in that program you probably already vote Dem or not at all.
Ok, sure… but my guess is that ACA costs aren’t your only political decision maker if you are financially independent. Other things, like market performance under one party over the other probably hold a greater weight on your political considerations. A person in that circumstance generally doesn’t vote with their wallet, they are voting with their portfolio.
But if you are younger, perhaps with a chronic condition, in a job that doesn’t provide a health insurance benefit, and with minimal 401k…you are weighting ACA costs…and are in a demographic that historically votes more blue.
Why? I didn’t vote for Trump, but 4 out of the 5 years he was in office my investments grew pretty substantially in a way that they didn’t under Obama and Biden, I can’t really count 2020 since there was somewhat of an external factor that year. Even still I didn’t lose, just didn’t grow as much.
If AI and tariffs don’t result in substantial market losses for me (and they haven’t yet) why should I care?
Might be some confirmation bias at work in one or both of us. I tend to see conservative people in the FIRE space, seems you see the opposite. I’ll look more closely to get a better feel.
Is there some way aside from the obvious mistruths they can demonstrate its the democrats fault, and achieve some electoral advantage?
Wyoming is extremely "red" according to Web searches (I am not an american)
My default assumption here is, it cannot, and this is going to cost them seats.