Unaffordable Care Act to become more unaffordable for millions in 2026 due to Trump's reconciliation bill, just in time for the election

 

 Why 22 million people may see ‘sharp’ increase in health insurance premiums in 2026

... More than 22 million people — about 92% of ACA enrollees — received a federal subsidy this year that reduced their insurance premiums, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

Those recipients would see “sharp premium increase” on Jan. 1, Cynthia Cox, the group’s ACA program director, said during a webinar on Wednesday.

The average marketplace enrollee saved $705 in 2024 — a 44% reduction in premium costs — because of the enhanced tax credits, according to a November analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Without the credits, average out-of-pocket premiums in 2026 would rise by more than 75%, Larry Levitt, KFF’s executive vice president for health policy, said during the webinar.

Additionally, 4.2 million Americans would become uninsured over the next decade if the enhanced subsidies lapse, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That growth in the ranks of the uninsured is on top of the nearly 12 million people expected to lose health coverage from over $1 trillion in spending cuts Republicans made to health programs like Medicaid and the ACA to help offset the legislation’s cost. ... 

ACA enrollment has more than doubled, to roughly 24 million people in 2025 from about 11 million in 2020, according to data tracked by The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. ...  

According to Google's AI, there are 22.8 million fewer uninsured 2010-2024, presumably because of Obamacare, but 26.7 million more on . . . Medicaid!

Because of that Rube Goldberg Machine known as Obamacare!

Push here, and it comes out there. And the kicker is Medicaid involves estate recovery for nursing home and other care costs at death, which varies by state.

You can run, but you cannot hide. 

 

 

The horror: Share paying no income taxes spikes from 44% in 2019 to 61% in 2020

 Stereotypical story here.

No one ever talks about how little Americans make.

In 2019, you'll be happy to know, 61% of individual wage earners in the US made less than $45,000. 

44% made less than $30k.

I'd like to see our legislators live on $30k, since so many of the people they claim to represent must. Maybe they'd be less inclined to rob us blind year in and year out with their trillion$ in spending.

Congressional salaries, incidentally, put the 435 members of the US House in the top 3.5% of individual wage earners.

IT'S WHY THEY RUN.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's something horribly wrong with a Rube Goldberg tax code which allows:

the rich to avoid taking "ordinary income" and pay little or zero tax on their fabulous capital returns;

more than the bottom half also to pay little to nothing (don't forget that they do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes);

and the people in-between to get squeezed to death.

Given that deficits no longer matter, why do taxes continue to matter? Just end them. We borrow the money anyway.

smdh

The only thing Trump has accomplished at "warp speed" is ruining the US economy because he ignored a deadly virus until it was too late

Trump, the supposed savior of US manufacturing, has presided over the utter collapse of manufacturing capacity utilization to a level in April 2020 never experienced in the post-war. The president could lawfully and easily order this unused capacity to make masks which would in fact protect everyone, and other PPE for hospital workers and care-givers to protect our front line workers, but he has not. Were he serious about re-opening the country, he would have made this JOB 2 on Feb 1, after JOB 1, which was hard-stopping all passenger air travel, the primary vector for the pandemic. Trump didn't do JOB 1, either.

Industrial production generally has imploded to levels never seen since 1919. The so-called America first president has done nothing in three years to make America strong enough to prevent this from happening. Remember Ann Coulter said long ago already that Trump was a lazy ignoramus. 

Motor vehicle production annualized has tanked 11 million units in just two months to fewer than 72,000 annualized. That's the typical monthly sales figure for a single popular car. 

Oh, I've forgotten unemployment, which also is unprecedented, though understated, at 14.7%. It's actually closer to 20%. North of 33 million not-seasonally-adjusted have made first time claims for unemployment from March 19th inclusive.

Trump's numbers are truly great, as in "you great oaf!"

Yes the government has "bailed out" the workers and the businesses, but with a Rube Goldberg machine which has been completely unfair in its results, picking winners by virtue of their established access to bankers or savvy state systems of unemployment administration. Bank or live somewhere not up to speed? Dats tuff, Anwar. You're a loser anyway.

Meanwhile coronavirus infections are set to soar again because our president is throwing a tantrum to open the country but hasn't made it safe to do so. He's had two months for that but has produced BUPKIS. If you want people to go back to work, they need masks. Where are the masks? Oh well, you were on your last legs anyway.

How anyone can vote to re-elect this level of horrific incompetence and reptilian danger is beyond me.

American Health Care Act of 2017 passes US House 217-213

The roll call is here.

20 Republicans and 193 Democrats (which is all of them) voted against it.

It's a Rube Goldberg fix to the Rube Goldberg machine known as Obamacare.

Krauthammer thinks Trump might go for single payer in the end, in which case Americans should get it, good and hard

Think of it as socialism with Republican characteristics.

Krauthammer, here:

Obamacare may turn out to be unworkable, indeed doomed, but it is having a profound effect on the zeitgeist: It is universalizing the idea of universal coverage.

Acceptance of its major premise — that no one be denied health care — is more widespread than ever. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan avers that “our goal is to give every American access to quality, affordable health care,” making universality an essential premise of his own reform. And look at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any Obamacare repeal. ...

As Obamacare continues to unravel, it won’t take much for Democrats to abandon that Rube Goldberg wreckage and go for the simplicity and the universality of Medicare-for-all.

Simplicity? Draco's laws were simple. The penalty for every crime was death.

I wonder if Krauthammer has a clue what he's talking about.

Total Medicare outlays in 2015 came to $632 billion.

Total Medicaid outlays in 2015 came to $552 billion country wide (read the Notes).

Total Social Security and Disability outlays in 2015 came to $897.1 billion.

That is a total of $2.0811 trillion from 2015 total net compensation of $7.4158 trillion, or 28%, without even talking about "universal coverage" yet.

Yet all your typical American pays now for this is 10.63%:

6.2% in Social Security tax and 1.45% for Medicare, plus whatever taxes are paid at the state and local level toward Medicaid, which federal law mandates must account for at least 40% of program revenues. So $221 billion from 160.8 million wage earners across the country in 2015 represents another 2.98% paid by them at the state level.

The status quo therefore is funded only 38% by its beneficiaries, at best. I say "at best" because many beneficiaries pay NOTHING because they don't work and never have. But I digress.

So bring about Krauthammer's revolution, for that is what he's talking about, and reset the table as follows.

Total healthcare outlays in the United States in 2015 came to $3.2 trillion. Add in $897.1 billion for Social Security and Disability, and you now have a "universal" obligation bloated to $4.097 trillion, which represents 55% of net compensation that year.

That's your tax.

You've become France, Germany, Denmark or some other Western European paradise which depends on the United States for its defense.

And that's before even talking about funding the $1.2 trillion part of the federal budget which is discretionary, like defending ourselves against that little fat kid playing with hydrogen bombs in North Korea.

Of course there's another chunk of money out there being made in the United States apart from net compensation, about $8 trillion in 2015. The recipients of this income typically pay the lower capital gains tax rates, not the payroll and income tax rates which are for the chumps.

It's a nice little system which isn't paying its fair share for socialism in the United States, even though it is rich guys who typically shout the loudest on behalf of it. They do this because they know it will keep the little guy down, from whom they don't want the competition some day. But tax that system equally to net compensation and you cut that 55% tax in half, to say 27.5%. That, however, means a big fat tax increase on the rich, and on everybody else. I doubt they'll stand for that any more than they open their checkbooks now to make patriotic voluntary donations to the US Treasury.

We live in a fantasy land where no one wants to pay what it costs for anything.

We think we can have our cake and eat it too.

We want infrastructure spending, and a tax cut dammit.

Michigan's Steve Gruber and Tim Walberg peddle stupid, continue to insist Obamacare passed with fewer than 60 votes in the Senate

This morning on Gruber's radio show before the eight o'clock hour.

Republicans continue to peddle this ridiculous idea that Obamacare passed without 60 votes in the Senate, for political reasons.

They're trying to build support for the current repeal effort, and give it a legitimacy with their constituencies which it will never have on its own, by elevating the possible outcome which won't pass with 60 votes in the Senate by denigrating Obamacare's legislative legitimacy.

That way they hope that the repeal bill, which won't repeal the shell provisions of the law because it can't, only the budget (reconciliation) provisions, will acquire an authority politically which Obamacare indisputably possesses because it passed with 60 votes.

But since the non-budgetary provisions of Obamacare will remain, and will not be repealed until Republicans have 60 votes in the Senate like Democrats had in 2009, Obamacare as law will continue to tower over this fiasco.

They all know that. They just don't want to remind you of that.

It's a Rube Goldberg strategy as ridiculous as Obamacare itself, except that Democrats beat Republicans with a stick in passing Obamacare and remain able to wield it.

Don't think that they won't.

Sen. Marco "Rube Goldberg" Rubio Thinks Fines On Illegals Will Pay For Border Security

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Quoted here:

“We need to register them as soon as possible, not just to keep the problem from getting worse, but we’re going to require them to pay a fine, and that’s the money that we are going to use to pay for the border security,” Rubio explained. “If we don’t get that fine money from the people that have violated our immigration laws, then the American taxpayer is going to have to pay for border security.”

Here's the most wildly optimistic estimate of total revenue from fees and fines on 11 million illegal aliens from The Christian Science Monitor: $2,000 per illegal over a decade. And good luck with that given all the work-arounds to fines and fees in the Senate bill. But, make the wild assumption you'll collect the full amount, and you get a paltry one time total of $22 billion.

The cost of security just on the Mexico border in 2012 was $11.7 billion according to BusinessWeek here. America is going to spend well north of $120 billion for border security over the next decade, and along comes Rubio telling us we need to flush the illegals out first before we secure the border in order to finance the security, otherwise the taxpayers will have to pay for it.

What a joke. We're going to pay for it anyway, big time.

In 2011 Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas was quoted in The New York Times here saying a fence alone would cost $30 billion and a decade to build:

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, claiming superior experience as the leader of the state with 1,200 miles of the border, advocated a more complex strategy, combining fencing and surveillance technology with “a lot of boots on the ground.” Mr. Perry said that building a border-length fence would take “10 to 15 years and $30 billion” and would not be cost-effective.

Whatever the answer is to illegal immigration, the Senate amnesty-first bill ain't it.