Never try to take away a benefit you’ve given to the masses Chapter One Politics 101
Shakespeare famously said, Revenge is a dish best served cold. Well, bad news for the GOP, former President Barack Obama pulled this entree out of a deep freezer. And the GOP has followed in lock step like a pack of rats behind the Pied Piper.
Of course, the Affordable Care Act was Obama’s signature piece of legislation, and he invested an almost insane amount of political capital in getting it done. So much in fact that it cost him the House majority in the 2010 midterms, and cursed us with the despicable astroturf Tea Party Movement, which morphed over time into the dreaded Freedom Caucus. But it all went for a noble cause, and a noble ending. Because, since the GOP’s sole goal was to deny a black President any notable legislative accomplishment, never mind one along the lines of Social Security in its impact, overturning that legislation became the sole legislative initiative for the GOP over the next decade.
Which was the legislative equivalent of looking for king Solomon’s treasure. Not to say that laws don’t get overturned at some point or another. They do. The two that come immediately to mind are the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, and the Folstad Act, which brought us prohibition. But those were, as most repealed laws are, different from their inception. Simply because the laws were self contained, all that was involved was changing federal paperwork.
The ACA was noticeably different. There’s a good reason why the ACA has more pages than the Manhattan telephone directory. The law wasn’t just creating new federal law and regulations, by its very design it was meant to interface with the internal policies and infrastructure of one of the largest corporate conglomerates in the country, the health insurance companies.
Just think of this for a minute. The ACA wasn’t just some federal law, it fundamentally changed the way that health insurance companies do business in this country. Just look at a few of the most prominent ways this legislation changed how health insurance companies operate;
- No more lifetime caps on health insurance payouts for an individual
- No more barring patients or gouging them for preexisting conditions
- Health insurance companies must provide affordable policies on the federal insurance exchanges
- Health insurance companies on the exchanges agreed to take federal subsidy payments for part of their payments
I can go on and on, but these are plenty. Because, as you can see, by their very nature these changes not only changed federal rules, but they mandated changes to the way health insurance providers operated as well. You don’t even want to think about the hundreds of millions it cost the healthcare insurance companies to create, install, then upgrade the new software needed to bring their processing and billing systems into compliance with the new law. All of their software systems were built based on compliance with the ACA.
Imagine if you will a plate of spaghetti sitting on a table. You’re sitting at the table with a fork. Given time, you can use that fork to untangle the individual strands of spaghetti and place them side by side. Now take that plate of spaghetti and drop it out of a fifth story window. Think you can still untangle that mess?
Which is exactly why the health insurance industry can’t afford for Traitor Tot and his mentally deficient midgets to scuttle the ACA. They had to redesign their entire business model for the ACA. No more price gouging, but they offset that with millions of more new customers paying lower premiums for more moderate services.
Traitor Tot is about to f*ck that up royally. The Big beautiful Bill that let the federal subsidies for personal health insurance policies sunset will have the basic effect of doubling the average monthly premium for people on the exchanges. It is estimated that some 15 million people will lose their insurance when the subsidies come to a crashing halt.
Question. Where the hell do the insurance companies go to recoup those losses? After all, it’s not like Emperor Numbus Nuttus repealed the ACA, all of the preexisting conditions and restrictions are still in place. They can’t slap back the lifetime payout caps, or refuse people with preexisting conditsions. Hell, with some 16 million customers lost, they’ll be begging people with preexisting conditions to sign up! And at this point, the only worse scenario for the insurance companies would be the actual repeal of Obamacare, which would leave their software systems in a complete meltdown. If I’m the CEO of a major US healthcare insurance company, my checkbook is going to be pretty firmly closed when GOP incumbents and candidates come sniffing around for a donation.
And now lets talk people. It’s a fact that the ten poorest states that take more federal funds than they chip in due to taxes are all red states, most of them southern. It’s not much of a stretch of logic to believe that a good portion of those 15 million people using ACA subsidy benefits are in those red states.
And who do they have to blame for the loss of health insurance benefits for themselves and their families? The GOP. And when rural hospitals start closing due to a lack of funding, who’s to blame? The GOP.
Right now, Traitor Tot is at an all time low in job approval polling on the economy, his single signature issue. Last time I checked, healthcare and insurance was a major driver in the economy for most lower and middle class Americans. What do you think those numbers are going to look like in February or March of next year, when those benefits are gone?
And I’ll close with this. In the 2025 special elections, Democrats have outperformed GOP candidates by an average of 27 points. Almost all of those were allegedly safe GOP districts. The Democrats flipped Virginia and increased their majority in New Jersey. The Democrats have discovered their mojo, and are running on the Epstein economy that lets rich sh*tpokes escape our lowly troubles. People hate the economy, and they’ll hate it even more once they lose their healthcare coverage. Traitor Tot lost 40 House seats in 2018. 2026 could make that look like the good old days. Don’t touch that dial.
I thank you for the privilege of your time.
Shakespeare never said, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” It appears to have originated in a 1841 French novel “Mathilde: Mémoires D’une Jeune Femme.”
But this line received much more notoriety when quoted by Khan to Admiral Kirk as an old Klingon proverb.
So you think that the “sole reason” that Republicans reject the aca is to deny a black president his signature legislation? Pretty crazy opinion, wrong too. obama care was a bad bill that became a bad law. About 88% of working Americans already had employer provided health care. Once the bill passed health premiums went up over 143%. The terrible law still relies on government subsidies to try to be affordable.
I would argue that the sole reason that democrats want to save the aca so badly is because it is the signature legislation of a black president.