Donner,
"And suddenly you are worried about someone sabotaging' Trumpy's hateful agenda?"
Think for a second.
It wasn't Trump who created the ACA.
It wasn't Trump who put the sunset clause in the subsidies.
The mess we're in now is due to how the last COVID-era extension was written. The enhancements were written to be temporary and are now expiring.
So how exactly is this "Trump's hateful agenda"?
Simply, we're at a fork in the road.
Either Congress comes up with something new, or ACA premiums explode and the message to people is basically: "Tough luck, just pay it."
You're so busy trying to pin this on Trump that you're ignoring the actual problem. Cost and the design of the entire healthcare support structure.
That attitude isn't being resistant. It's simply counterproductive and doesn't make sense.
If Democrats in Congress behave the way you are, then healthcare benefits for the poor are finished until someone addresses it again.
What needs to be addressed now is cost controls and the reality that people in employer group plans are getting hit harder every year.
The company might cover the employee portion, but family coverage is often pushed partly or even mostly onto the employee. Deductibles in group plans keep rising while coverage shrinks. The ACA didn't fix any of that because the employer plan cost shift hadn't hit the critical stage yet.
Since the time ACA was implemented, some problems improved, but other problems, especially rising deductibles, and cost shifting in employer plans, have only gotten worse.
Lastly, many employers offer tiered plans such as Bronze and Gold options. Managers often receive access to the Gold tier while regular employees end up in the Bronze tier, which is legal under ACA guidelines but puts a heavy cost burden on families.
This imbalance is one more reason the ACA needs to be updated or replaced with a system that directly addresses today's issues including cost controls and fairness in employer sponsored plans.
Eff,
My opinion.
Democrats keep talking about the ACA as if it is a permanent, flawless solution, but it was never designed to fix one of today's major health care problems. The middle class is getting crushed by employer plans.
When the ACA first rolled out, the crisis was about the uninsured and the poorest Americans, and it succeeded in reducing that problem. But family coverage under employer plans has exploded in cost, deductibles have climbed, and many companies now split coverage into tiers where management might be offered "better" plans and workers get something else. That was not treated as a critical issue in 2010. It is now and Congress should address it.
Democrat politicians talk about protecting the ACA and say they want to help working families, but do they mean it? Will they actually make the difficult revisions needed, or will we just hear the same talking points every four years.
There is a real difference between talking about expanding ACA subsidies and actually fixing employer sponsored plans which is the part of the system that affects millions of people who go to work every day. The constant habit of blaming every failure on Republicans is getting old. Someone needs to own the problem.
To me, Trump is trying to acknowledge that the current system is failing without hiding behind excuses. He is not perfect and I do not know if he will get it right, but at least he is not pretending everything is fine. Democrats seem stuck defending the ACA as if admitting its shortcomings would hurt them politically. Honestly, it is getting hard to tell if this is strategy or if they are just in full blown denial.
The real question is whether anyone in Washington, Democrat or Republican, is willing to take on the corporate and insurance interests that benefit from keeping the middle class squeezed.
If all we get are more speeches about working families while nothing changes for them in policy, then extending the ACA without real reform is "politics as usual" and not progress.