Healthcare Premiums OFFICIALLY SPIKE As Republicans Panic

So, as part of that angry manic speech last night, President Trump did also talk about what he thinks should happen with healthcare. Let's take a listen.

The first of these unprecedented price reductions will be available starting in January through a new website, trumprx.gov. And these big price cuts will greatly reduce the cost of healthcare. I'm also taking on the gigantic health insurance companies that have gotten rich on billions of dollars of money that should go directly to the people. The money should go to the people.

That's you. So they can buy their own health insurance, which will give far better benefits at much lower costs. It will be far better health insurance. The current unaffordable care act was created to make insurance companies rich. It was bad health care at much too high a cost and

you see that now in the steep increase in premiums being demanded by the Democrats and they are demanding those increases and it's their fault. It is not

the Republicans fault, it's the Democrats fault. They are demanding those increases after we had an entire government shutdown around trying to extend the ACA subsidies. And this comes as Republicans are really kind of in a mess with regard to health care. You have some moderates who realize these price hikes are going to be a major problem. They want to vote for the ACA subsidy extension. Hakeem Jeffries has been pushing a three-year extension. He actually succeeded in getting the requisite number of moderate Republicans onto that discharge

petition to force a vote. So that was a significant development. At the same time, you have Republicans who are pushing this sort of grab bag of really small ball, like, sort of consensus policies about choice plans and some moderate, not even like significant pharmacy benefit manager reform, but some moderate stuff there.

Things that, you know, may around the edges make things modestly better, but it's not gonna be like a significant reduction in your premiums or significant game changer anytime soon. Speaker Johnson was asked, after these moderate Republicans defected,

whether he had lost control of the House. Let's take a listen to that. Have you lost control?

Have you lost control of the House?

I have not lost control of the House. Because this is the third time.

There are, look, we have the smallest majority in US history.

These are not normal times.

There are processes and procedures in the House that are less frequently used when there are larger majorities. And when you have the luxury of having 10 or 15 people who disagree on something, you know, you don't have to deal with it. But when you have a razor-thin margin, as we do, all of these people are on the table.

So he claims he has not, in fact, lost control of the House. Let's go ahead and take a listen to some of these moderate Republican legislators and how pissed they are at his handling of health care. This is C4. Let's take a listen.

I am pissed for the American people. This is absolute bullshit. And it's absurd that we are in a body with 435 members. Everybody has a responsibility to serve their district, to serve their constituents.

What do you say to the speaker who's not gonna give you a vote on this AC extension?

That's a failure of leadership. I mean, we have members on both sides who believe this is an urgent issue, and it is for all of our members in terms of what their constituents are gonna have to deal with in the start of the new year.

So what's wrong with having a vote?

So there you go. They are pissed because Johnson didn't even give them the ability to vote on an ACA subsidy extension, which is why ultimately they came to Hakeem Jeffries' position and signed onto this discharge petition, getting it to 218 signatures. And listen, not a Hakeem Jeffries fan, and I think he's played his cards very poorly in the past in terms of, like, being a communicator or an orator, terrible.

Tactically, he played this very intelligently. He put this petition forward. There were some other rival Democratic positions. Josh Gottheimer had one that sucked and some other ones, et cetera. And he stayed strong on this particular position, betting that other harder line Republicans in the House would make it impossible for them to even offer them a show vote on these

ACA subsidy extension, and that those Republicans would ultimately come to his position. That is exactly what happened.

Yeah. And unfortunately, Speaker Johnson, just some inside baseball here, he canceled votes on Friday and sent everybody home early to kick this health care vote to the new year.

It's also interesting, the Epstein files released that day as well. All kinds of reasons to get out of town.

He's like, get everybody the hell out of Washington, because they don't want them all on Capitol Hill with cameras in their face where they have to react. So a little bit of inside baseball there for everybody. But no, it's a disaster. And I think that's one of the things

why Trump announced it in his speech is because it felt very poll-tested to me. He's like, we have to hit inflation, we have to hit healthcare, we have to hit housing. And on healthcare, you know, this plan about we're gonna give everybody money, it's like, again, I mean, between the subsidies or the money,

the problem is the cost. Like, if they give you, I've said here, my deductible is $14,500. The increase in my premium, and I have Obamacare, is, the increase in my premiums is 17%. So if they were to grant this HSA or whatever grant

to a family, it would cover the increase in healthcare. Like, I'm sorry, that is just, yes, okay, I'll take it. I'm sure everybody else will take it too. That doesn't mean that you've revolutionarily changed my life, all right? I'm not gonna be like, wow, thank you for covering

the increase in my healthcare premium over a year. That's just me. There's a lot of other people out there too who I think will probably feel the same way. They're like, the government's gonna cover one fifth of your deductible.

You're like, yippee.

Right.

You know? That's just not like, and then, you know, I was talking to Steve, our audio engineer today, and he was talking about how even when you do pay a thousand bucks a month for healthcare, if you have a higher deductible plan, like you avoid going to the doctor just because you're like, ah, who's gonna have to do co-pays and all of it.

That is the fundamental issue. This is all tinkering around the edges. So yes, even with ACA subsidies, like sorry, it's just not, you know, the subsidies themselves were a band-aid to a broken and a shit system. And until we get very real about costs, nothing's really gonna be, nothing's gonna change. And what the subsidy conversation, I think, ignited is,

because that's the thing, is like, no one wants to defend the subsidies, let's say, on paper, because everybody agrees it's still an insane system. It's horrible. But what the subsidy conversation ignited for everybody is just to think about the government and healthcare and about the fact that they can do something.

And this was a rare case where just doing the status quo was better than letting them expire because now everybody is thinking about healthcare in a different way, I think, than previously, or it's more top of mind. And right now the subsidies have officially,

I think today, expired, so it's over. We're cooked, those of us who are Obamacare subscribers. But it's not, I mean, look, we're only seven million. There's 10 hundreds of millions of people who have healthcare. Their premiums went up no matter what happened here.

Period. So, and again, for most people, because healthcare's so complicated, they don't know whether they're getting a subsidy or not, they're like, my bill went up, screw Trump. That's how they're gonna think. They have no idea whether they get a subsidy or not. Because health care is complicated as shit.

That's absolutely right. I've seen all these polls about, like, in Kentucky, the Obamacare exchange, I can't remember what it was called, it's like Kentucky Care or something like that. And people are like, no, I hate that. And it's like, it's literally the same thing. And I don't blame him because it is complicated. I don't understand all of the ins and outs.

And I studied this for a living. People come from other countries where they have universal healthcare. They're like, what is this? What is happening here? What is going on with this?

Yeah, so yes, you see your bill go up, you hear a national conversation about how Republicans are blocking these subsidies and you think, oh, my bill is going up because these assholes aren't helping to fund the healthcare that they were doing previously. And yes, Republicans really are in trouble on this issue. Anytime healthcare is at the forefront of the political discussion- Yeah, they're screwed.

Yeah, it's probably- Except 2010, when people were mad because their health care got messed up. Yes, and when they could live in the abstract of like, this is bad, we'll do something better. But now after years and years and years of number one, people experiencing some benefits from Obamacare, and number two, Republicans demonstrating time and time again they have zero answer or alternative that would be in any way superior., healthcare is probably their

worst, single worst issue. And so, you know, while I have, I, you know, thought it was terrible that Democrats ultimately caved on their shutdown fight, they did succeed in really focusing attention on this issue, which had been on the back burner for a couple of years, basically since the 2020 Democratic primary. Healthcare has been on the back burner as an issue and not at the center of public conversation,

even as the pain continued to ratchet up and increase year after year after year. We can put this Politico tarot sheet up on the screens, this C5, just to give a sense of, you know, they've got some reporting about how the White House is thinking about all of this. They say the White House weighs risks of a healthcare fight as ACA subsidies set to expire. The White House is wary that the current debate

around healthcare subsidies could go the way of Republicans' failure to repeal Obamacare that fueled Democrats' return to power in 2018. If only it were that simple. The administration is also contending with differing opinions over the political ramifications

of the subsidies expiring, the question of whether Trump's engagement might be unproductive on the Hill, and the reality that Trump behind the scenes likely knows something must be done to prevent the premium spike some Americans would see. As congressional Republicans do count their intra-party divisions on how to address the expiration of some Affordable Care Act subsidies, administration officials do not believe Trump

should engage more than he already has. That's because they're fearful of the president getting yoked into a messy health care fight according to people close to the White House and who were familiar with health care conversations between the White House and the Hill. So you know I mean that Trump being such a you know the leader of this party and a very strong leader of this party even though he has been

hobbled in recent months, the fact that they kind of want to keep him hands off and for him not to just assert this is what we're doing, and if you don't go along with it, I'm going to make you pay for not going along with my plan, also leaves them sort of adrift. Because Mike Johnson is nothing other than effectively a puppet, like doing whatever he thinks it is that Trump wants him to do. So if he's left to his own devices, that's part of why you're seeing such an absolute mess

and a chaotic disaster right now.

Remember the Senate too, even if it does get through the House. Like what's gonna happen with the Senate? Is Trump gonna sign it, right? Especially after talking such a big game, how's that gonna work, right? I'm a betting person. I'm sure there's some calci, poly market, market on that. I would never bet on making sure that the premiums

are in any way going to come. The most likely, if at all possible scenario, will be what I said, some weird $1,000 means tested check to Obamacare alone, which does not, to the point of hundreds of millions of people out there have insurance,

their insurance statistically almost certainly went up in the last year. They have no idea whether it's quote subsidized or not or whatever connected to ACA. They're gonna see that cost and they're gonna get mad. So that fundamentally is why they don't understand

what's actually happening here. And yeah, I mean, they should pay for it, honestly, the way that they've handled it. It's just been a total disaster because they refused to, like, they talk, what did he say? Concepts of a plan beforehand. The bet was, is that we're just never going to have to deal with this. That's what every politician does.

But then, for some reason, they said, let's let the subsidies expire. So they finally put it back into America's mind. All you had to do was nothing. Just let the ACA things go on. But for some, what, ridiculous deficit hawkery type reasons, they decided, and now, just like Obama,

anybody who messes with the healthcare system, if you do it in the worst way, you're screwed. That's the one thing people just don't want. They do not want their healthcare messed with, period, unless it's gonna get better, and then even then you better prove it.

And damn, no.

Yeah, I mean, because it's hard to do it where it gets better for everyone. And the people who have had it, you know, had something where they feel like it was taken away from them, they're going to be very exercised about it. I mean, with Obama, at least there were people who were immediately benefiting from Obamacare.

With this, it's like nothing but, you know,

it's shipping. Yeah. So to the Obama point, this is what I wanna expound on. Yeah, we have a little bit of time. So the Obamacare was fundamentally kind of a socialist argument,

where it's like it socialist policy in practice. As in, yeah, more people are covered, is that good? It's like, well, it's like healthcare kind of got shittier for everybody. It's very difficult to preserve a system of coverage and of high quality. That's the fundamental problem

between like market-based healthcare, privatized healthcare. Even in Europe and in others, you know, they have triage care. Now, listen, I'm not going to say that that's better or worse. It's a tradeoff. A lot of people over there have accepted us. America is a very individualist nation. Even when you do look at polls, people are very dissatisfied with the healthcare system, but they personally like their own healthcare coverage. This was the problem with Obamacare.

That's part of the reason why public option or something like that, or you've got to find a place where people can preserve their individuality, their ability to choose, et cetera, while also trying to make sure that people aren't dying from medical debt. This is the Gordian Knot, which is almost like, for some reason, just nobody can really figure it out. And I do think it's going to be really difficult for the Republicans in the future, because

they're going to grasp at straws and they're gonna just throw more money into this corrupt system. Fundamentally, that's where I think we're gonna end up. Some weird check or something that gets deposited into some account where you don't know the login

and you're gonna have to coordinate with your insurance company. That's how it always works, right? Even with Obamacare, signing up for it is a nightmare. You have to go on there and pick coverage or whatever, and then oh, and now you have to deal

with the insurance company. Unfortunately, that's just the way it works.

And then every year you start getting these notices about like, you've got to pick again, open enrollment.

What is going on?

And I'm like, do I still have coverage or not?

Like, what's going on here? And yeah, I mean, I think that's just the fundamental political problem with healthcare. And nobody seems to square it. Like, what's going on here? And yeah, I mean, I think that's just the fundamental political problem with healthcare. And nobody seems to square it.

I don't know.