See Trump flail. Run, America, run.
First it was the 180 on Epstein. Then the 180 on Mamdani. Then MTG sucked the air out of the MAGA inferno. Now it's the ACA subsidies Trump ORDERED Republicans to not even consider.
Remember the ACA subsidy cliff?
Where the nation is because of Trump is actually ugly, but I’ll let others smarter than I detail the very real danger right now of Trump’s flailing, as it is increasingly obvious even to the totally snookered that Trump is not all there mentally.
This post: If you don’t remember the ACA subsidy issue, here’s the backdrop: Republicans are barreling toward an ACA subsidies cliff cleverly created by Senate Dems when they ran up the white flag on the shutdown. The quick update is Rs fussed and fumed and puffed out their chests and then left for their next paid vaca this week. SOP.
So, enter their hero to save the day. Because it’s scary times when tried ‘n true dog whistles—radical left! drug dealers! rapists!—don’t work anymore, when even your MAGA faithful and Fox News say they don’t love you anymore.
What’s a…leader…to do? Switch sides, of course, the grass suddenly looking greener over there on the damn left, where, unfathomably, all the love suddenly seems to be. After all, kidnapping Dem ideas has worked fine before. (Not that Dems haven’t done the same. All’s fair in love, war and politics).
First it was his 180 on releasing the Epstein files after months/years of fighting that. Then it was Mamdani, whose election, as we all knew, was the start of the end of the free world. I particularly like this pre-Mamdani meeting post from one of my all-time favorite how-to-make-your-healthcare-work-for-my-bank-account experts, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL. Of course).1
Oops. Didn’t quite work out that way. And when Ms. Marjorie split, things got even worse. Who knew it might not actually be Trump who hung the MAGA moon?
But no matter, no subsidies!!! He was ALL CAPS CLEAR about that on Nov. 8. Send cash'“money” to Americans to buy their own healthcare…from, well, the same “fat cat” insurance companies. There were some issues, to say the least, with that “money” idea, which we covered previously. Congress, knowing that, pretended they didn’t hear that part.
That was then. Congress was supposed to fix a clear Catch 22.
But wait! They left town. So now we have the I-suddenly-love-subsidies idea.
It was only a month ago Johnson exalted that the House had a lot of really great ideas on healthcare. But after Scott and others promoted some HSA-ish proposals, Republicans just…gave up. Which isn’t new; that’s been their ‘strategy’ since Obamacare (ACA) passed 15 years ago. All noise, no action.
In the meantime, someone(s) finally got through to Trump on how the subsidies expiration might just be a problem for the 2026 midterms. (No kidding.) Not to mention the huge budget bill Medicaid cuts would have begun by then, too. And the really, really bad news it’s not just Congress that’s in a tailspin about all this. The public, including MAGA, has also figured it out.
So this week, just as lawmakers, tails tightly tucked, were fleeing for Thanksgiving, he teased yet another 180: Extend the subsidies for two years. Yes, really.
Not surprisingly, there are…issues:
The instant reaction of Congress was not receptive. Johnson immediately said the House wasn’t interested. After all, his Freedom Caucus has never been shy about how they feel about the ACA. Give Johnson plenty of legality-tweaking excuses and a few months, and maybe he could deal with them. Two weeks? Not so much.
Fortune says the cost would be $50 billion.
So, the White House is back to the drawing table. After all, this should be easy, right? There’s that concept of a plan, ready to just be tweaked, right? Uh-huh.
Stay tuned. We’re watching. And we hope you have, hopefully, a wonderfully politics-free Thanksgiving. Alternatively, there’s this:
Scott, the financial healthcare genius who led the then-largest ever Medicare fraud penalty at the for-profit national healthcare company he headed, ColumbiaHCA. Just look at him. I ask: Would you trust this guy to get us out of our healthcare fiasco? You’re right. Do not. His wife needs a new fur coat. In Florida.
