Category: Obamacare
The Obamacare subsidy fight exposes who Washington really serves
The failure of both Democrat and Republican plans to extend or partially replace enhanced Obamacare subsidies offers a clear lesson: Escaping an entitlement trap almost never happens.
Yes, the House of Representatives on Thursday voted to extend the COVID-era Affordable Care Act subsidies that expired at the end of 2025. Seventeen Republicans even joined a unanimous Democratic Caucus in voting for the extension. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Republicans have “no appetite” for an extension — at least not without reforms.
Republicans remain an impediment to the necessary reforms and are working hand in hand with Democrats to bring on economic collapse. Time is not on our side.
The reality is, once government creates a welfare entitlement, logic and sustainability exit the conversation. Politicians do not debate whether to grow the program. They argue only over how much to increase spending and how to disguise the costs. That pattern now governs the fight over enhanced Obamacare subsidies.
Why the premise never gets challenged
When the Senate rejected a nearly identical bill in December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Congress faces “no clear path for aiding millions of Americans facing soaring Affordable Care Act insurance costs next year.”
The Journal’s framing accepts the entitlement premise without question. It treats “aiding millions” as morally self-evident while ignoring the coercion necessary to fund that aid. Government assistance does not materialize from thin air. It transfers responsibility, money, and risk from one group of Americans to another.
Once imposed, that transfer only grows.
Both rejected plans would have sent more taxpayer money to insurers than the ACA already guarantees. With no deal in sight, the Journal observed last month that hope for extending the subsidies is fading. That assessment may be accurate politically, but an extension does not deserve hope. It deserves scrutiny.
How entitlement politics works
Democrats want Republicans to extend an expansion they never voted for of a program they never supported. Republicans respond by proposing modest adjustments to reduce political damage without challenging the underlying structure.
Rep. Max L. Miller (R-Ohio), who voted for the bill, summarized the dilemma perfectly. “I just want to make this abundantly clear: This is a Democratic piece of legislation. It is absolutely horrific. Now, it is the best alternative to what we have at the moment.”
That is how entitlement traps operate.
For decades, big-government advocates have followed a reliable strategy. They create a benefit for a defined group, allow costs to spiral, then dare the opposition to take something away from a newly entrenched constituency. When the moment arrives, those who claim to favor limited government retreat or propose cosmetic reforms that leave the core system untouched.
That dynamic explains why the country remains locked into the socialist ratchet, the uniparty routine, and a political class that acts as tax collector for an ever-expanding welfare state.
RELATED: Democrat senator makes stunning admission about Obamacare failures
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trapped voters, trapped taxpayers
Entitlements squeeze the nation from both sides. They trap recipients by discouraging work and mobility, and they trap taxpayers by locking future governments into permanent obligations.
The Affordable Care Act stands as one of the most powerful modern examples of this system. The law forced millions into government-regulated insurance markets while guaranteeing insurers a growing pool of subsidized customers. The result was predictable: higher costs, deeper dependency, and a massive political constituency invested in permanent expansion.
Not a single Republican voted for the ACA. They understood what the law would do. Democrats passed it anyway, and it worked exactly as designed.
Who Obamacare was really built to serve
As Connor O’Keeffe has argued at Mises Wire, federal health care policy has long served industry interests. Government interventions channel money toward providers, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers under the guise of helping patients.
Obamacare accelerated that process by mandating coverage and expanding what insurers must provide, driving demand and cost growth in tandem. Once people rely on government assistance to afford insurance, any reduction becomes politically unthinkable.
Republicans now scramble to avoid electoral consequences. House Speaker Mike Johnson says the GOP will advance health care proposals without extending subsidies, yet many lawmakers privately admit that only an extension prevents immediate pain ahead of the 2026 midterms.
That admission exposes the trap. Spending limits become cruel. Taxpayer costs disappear from the conversation. Only the next premium increase matters.
Why conservatives keep losing
History explains where this leads. Entitlement debates almost always end with higher spending. Political power depends on payments to voters. Reducing benefits means losing elections.
Progressives act decisively when in power. Conservatives obsess over procedure and restraint, even as the administrative state grows unchecked.
Last week alone offered two examples. The House overturned President Trump’s March 2025 executive order blocking collective bargaining for over a million federal employees, with 20 Republicans joining Democrats. Even Franklin Roosevelt opposed public-sector unions. Modern conservatives could not summon the resolve to block them.
On the same day, Indiana Republicans declined to redraw their congressional map despite the risk of losing the House and triggering impeachment proceedings against Trump. They clung to unwritten norms while their opponents prepared to exploit the outcome.
RELATED: If conservatives will not defend capitalism, who will?
Leontura via iStock/Getty Images
This pattern defines conservative failure. Republicans manage decline. They preserve a decaying system rather than reverse it.
Donald Trump broke from that habit. A former Democrat, he understands power. Win elections, then act. Trump restored a political energy absent on the right for decades.
His approach to entitlements focuses on restraining growth outside Social Security while expanding private-sector freedom to increase economic output. The goal is not austerity. It is to shrink government’s share of the economy by growing everything else faster.
Reform or collapse
That strategy may succeed or fail. It remains the only alternative to collapse. Without reform, federal spending and debt will overwhelm the system within a decade, possibly sooner. Borrowing costs will explode. Inflation will surge. Control will vanish.
The United States approached that danger under unified Democrat control and Joe Biden’s autopen in 2021 and 2022. Voters halted the slide by electing Republican majorities and returning Trump to the White House.
Trump failed to drain the swamp in his first term, largely because congressional Republicans refused to legislate when they had the chance. In his second term, he has advanced reforms through executive action. Congress has responded with delay and timidity.
The country will escape the entitlement trap one way or another. Reform can arrive through disciplined growth and economic expansion, or through collapse driven by massive overspending.
With their conservative approach to governance, Republicans remain an impediment to the necessary reforms and are working hand in hand with Democrats to bring on that collapse. Time is not on our side.
IT’S THE DEMS, STUPID! Karoline Leavitt Schools Press on Who Exactly Created the Obamacare Problem [WATCH]
![IT’S THE DEMS, STUPID! Karoline Leavitt Schools Press on Who Exactly Created the Obamacare Problem [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/GettyImages-2251416828-300x200.jpg "Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Holds White House Media Briefing")
Obamacare — it’s right there in the name.
Glenn Beck loses it over new GAO report exposing ANOTHER multibillion-dollar Obamacare heist
Remember when Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency started combing through federal spending with a fine-tooth comb and making commonsense cuts, and the Democrats had a tantrum of epic proportions?
That’s because they didn’t want the American people to know about all their little NGOs that intentionally “fund our destruction.” They didn’t want us to find out about the billions of dollars in Obamacare fraud, Glenn Beck says.
On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office published a report addressing fraud in the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
Titled “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Preliminary Results from Ongoing Review Suggest Fraud Risks in the Advance Premium Tax Credit Persist,” the report reveals the following key findings:
- GAO ran fake applicants through the system, and almost all of them still got approved for subsidized coverage, even when identity proofing failed up front and they submitted bogus documents.
- In 2023, there were over $21 billion in premium tax credits that the IRS couldn’t match to filed tax returns — meaning that money was likely issued to ineligible people or in the wrong amounts.
- In 2023, about 58,000 people listed were flagged as deceased who still appeared to have subsidies paid on their behalf, roughly $94 million in total.
- There were 29,000 instances of the same Social Security number used across multiple plans, including one extreme case where a single SSN was tied to more than 125 policies.
- From January to August 2024, CMS logged about 275,000 complaints from people saying they were enrolled or switched into plans without their consent.
- In 2018, CMS tested the system’s susceptibility to fraud and found numerous high-risk issues, yet has failed to make any changes or reassess since.
But don’t get upset yet, because the worst part comes next.
“These are the exact same findings the GAO had in 2015/2016. … It is literally word for word almost the same findings,” says Glenn’s chief researcher, Jason Buttrill.
Glenn is deeply disturbed by the GAO’s report.
“When a government becomes this incompetent and unaccountable, your country starts to completely fall apart,” he sighs.
“We see Democrats now rushing to the microphone to defend the perpetrators, the judges that are reversing verdicts to protect the people who stole from you. I contend that the people that are rushing to the microphones to defend it are the people who have been covering this up,” he speculates.
The people behind this fraud — whether they committed or overlooked it — should go to jail, he says, and anyone who disagrees is just “brainwashed.”
Although the country is suffering from “foreign invasion,” “internal strife,” and “financial collapse,” it is “internal corruption” that will be our ultimate downfall, he warns.
“Stop the fraud,” he pleads.
“Our country will not survive if we continue to normalize this stuff,” he adds.
To hear more of Glenn’s response to the GAO’s disturbing report, watch the video above.
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TRUMP TACKLING HEALTHCARE: Don Says He’s Having ‘Personal Talks With Democrats’ About Fixing Healthcare [WATCH]
![TRUMP TACKLING HEALTHCARE: Don Says He’s Having ‘Personal Talks With Democrats’ About Fixing Healthcare [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GettyImages-2247182148-300x207.jpg "President Trump Meets With White House Task Force On FIFA World Cup")
Might an Obamacare fix be on the way?
Free markets don’t need federal babysitters
At a recent competition law symposium in Washington, the Trump administration’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, made a welcome promise to keep markets open to new competitors and innovation.
That pledge comes at a critical moment. Too many politicians in both parties still believe government’s job is to engineer economic outcomes rather than let consumers decide. That mindset misunderstands what makes markets dynamic — and often locks in the very problems regulators claim they want to fix.
Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced ‘industrial policy’ when it serves their political interests. They call it leadership, but it’s just another form of central planning.
Cronyism takes many forms: subsidies for favored industries, tax breaks for politically connected firms, or lawsuits targeting companies for being too successful.
Take the Biden Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Visa. The administration said it “feared” Visa’s market share, even though the payments space is crowded with competitors — Mastercard, PayPal, Square, Apple Pay, and a swarm of fintech startups. Instead of protecting consumers, the Justice Department tried to punish one company for competing well and dictate the terms of an already vibrant market.
That’s not protecting competition — it’s manipulating it. When government intervenes this way, it distorts incentives, weakens confidence, and replaces consumer choice with bureaucratic preference.
Consumers always lose
When regulators overreach, consumers pay the price. Every dollar a company spends fending off groundless lawsuits is a dollar not spent on innovation. Every subsidy handed to a politically favored firm skews the playing field against smaller rivals. And every new dictate slows the experimentation that keeps markets alive.
Officials who justify these intrusions claim they’re “protecting competition.” But true competition doesn’t need Washington’s help. It needs Washington to step aside. Entrepreneurs, not regulators, create rivals. Consumers, not bureaucrats, decide who wins. The invisible hand disciplines firms far more effectively than any government lawyer.
Free markets need fewer meddlers
Government’s legitimate role is narrow: preventing fraud, enforcing contracts, and protecting property. That’s a far cry from deciding which companies are “too profitable,” which mergers are “too large,” or which industries deserve “strategic” subsidies. When officials cross that line, they stop refereeing and start playing the game themselves — badly.
This temptation spans parties. Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced “industrial policy” when it serves their political interests. They call it leadership, but it’s just another form of central planning that shackles consumers and businesses alike.
RELATED: Smash the health care cartel, free the market
File photo/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The cure is restraint
The best way forward is simple. Washington should stop punishing success and stop handing out favors to friends. It should let consumers and entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats and lobbyists, determine winners and losers.
America’s prosperity was built on open competition and voluntary exchange — not government micromanagement. Crony capitalism is just socialism by another name, and it breeds the same stagnation and corruption.
President Trump’s team understands that prosperity comes from freedom, not favoritism. If policymakers truly care about fairness, they should start by doing the hardest thing in politics: stepping aside.
