Buried in a recent New York Times op-ed about the end of the government shutdown is the quietest confession you’ll ever hear from the elites: "Why can’t Republicans just accept reality? These [Obamacare] healthcare subsidies are working." But who are they working for? Healthcare prices are still incredibly high! Glenn reminds us what "subsidies" really are: money "borrowed" from the future to hide the failures of the present, and lining the insurance companies' pockets.
Transcript
Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: So is the shutdown over? I mean, it has to go to the House, and now the House is saying that they're not going to pass it.
STU: Well, the House should be -- I don't think there's any real belief that they won't pass it. The hurdle was the Senate. And they got through the Senate. Now we get to watch the ongoing democratic Civil War, about whether or not Chuck Schumer will be removed or not.
GLENN: It's crazy. It is crazy.
So, you know, let me go through something that came in from the New York Times. What were the Democrats thinking?
It starts out, in this op-ed, back in September, when I was reporting an article, Democrats should shut down the government, I kept hearing the same warning from veterans of past shutdown fights.
President controls the bully pulpit, and parts of the government will stay open, and he decides what parts close.
It's very, very hard for the opposition party to win a shutdown. Blah, blah.
Now they have brokered a deal over the weekend, as the Senate Democrats broke ranks and negotiated a deal to end the shutdown, and return for, if we're being honest, very little according to the New York Times.
The guts of the deal are this. Food assistance, both SNAP and WIC will get a bit more funding. There will be a few more modest concessions on spending levels elsewhere in the government.
Laid off federal workers will be rehired, and furloughed federal workers will be given back pay.
Most of the government is funded, only until the end of January. Get ready, we'll be doing this again.
The deal does nothing to extend the aspiring affordable care tax credits, which Democrats essentially have shut down the government for, in the first place. First of all, it's not the affordable care tax credit.
That's -- that's not why you shut it down.
There are tax credits, yes.
But this is different. These were the government subsidies. Leave it to the New York Times. Let me lay this really clear. Democrats demanded a continuation of the enhanced subsidies for the American care act. Okay?
They were temporarily expanded during the pandemic. These were not the tax credits. These were extra subsidies stuffed into the 2021 American rescue plan, as an emergency measure. Remember, the one, we had to pass this in the middle of the night. And nobody could read it. Well, that's what it was in it. And these subsidies lowered the premiums more than usual. Expanded the eligibility far above the original ACA income caps. And was always designed to be temporary just for COVID.
So if you were in COVID, and I lost your job, and you didn't have health care or whatever, you could get on the ACA.
Even though, you're -- you're -- your salary was higher than it would be accepted.
Normally. You could get on it.
But once -- once they created this, Washington does what Washington always does, and they won't let it go.
Okay.
It's not the tax credit. To understand why this shutdown will end with such a whimper, you need to understand the strange role the ACA subsidies played in it. Democrats said the shutdown was about subsidies. But for most of them, it wasn't. This is the New York Times saying this.
It was about Trump's authoritarianism. It was about showing their base and themselves, that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment, abnormally.
The ACA subsidies emerged as the shutdown demand because they could keep the caucus sufficiently united. They put Democrats on the right side of public opinion, even though self-identified MAGA voters wanted the subsidies extended.
And they held the quivering Senate coalition together. You shut the government down, with the Democratic caucus that you have, not with the Democratic caucus that you want.
But the shutdown was built on a cracked foundation. There were Senate Democrats who didn't want a shutdown at all. There were Senate Democrats who did want a shutdown. But thought it was strange to make their demands so narrow. Was winning on health care premiums really winning the right fight?
Shouldn't Democrats really vote to fund the government, turning towards authoritarianism, as long as health insurance subsidies are preserved? And what if winning the health care fight was actually a political gift to Trump. Now, this is the New York Times.
Absent a fix, the average health insurance premium for 20 million Americans were more than double. The premium shock will hit red states really hard.
Trump's long time pollster had released a survey of competitive house districts. Showing that letting the tax credits expire. Might be lethal to Republican effort to see hold the House. Why were the Democrats fighting so hard to neutralize their best issue in 2026. The political logic of this shutdown fight was inverted. If Democrats got tax credits extended, if they won. They would be solving a huge electoral problem for the Republicans. If Republicans successfully allowed the tax credits to expire if they won, which would be handing the Democrats a cudgel which would beat them in the next elections. This is unbelievable!
I mean, they're saying -- they're saying it out loud. You know what I mean?
They go on in this, to say, you know. Quote, why can't Republicans just accept reality. These health care subsidies are working.
No. They're not. No, they're not.
They are propping. Okay?
They're scaffolding. Holding up a structure that was never sound.
They were a COVID-era brace jammed under a tottering wall. And now, the same architects who swore the House -- the House was safe. They're telling you the splintered wood was actually part of the design. What?
This is the power the mainstream media has. The press still has over mainstream Americans. It's kind of like a hypnotic choke hold.
You say the word subsidy enough times with the right sad piano music under it, and suddenly, we forget what subsidies are. Here's what subsidies are, gang!
Money borrowed from the Chinese. But we're not on the hook for it. We're not on the hook for it.
Money borrowed from the Chinese, from the future, to hide the failures of the present on decisions that were made in the past. Okay?
And now we're told, if we don't just keep borrowing forever, America will collapse. No. What collapses is this crazy illusion. Let's be clear about something the op-ed never will admit. The Affordable Care Act didn't fail because of Republicans. It failed because math is a stubborn thing because insurance is not health care.
Because a program bent around bureaucrats and middlemen will always cost more and deliver less!
We have been subsidizing the symptoms. We never treated the disease here. And now, when a shutdown touches those subsidies, suddenly we're told the sky is cracking. TikTok is flooded with panic videos scripted by algorithms that can't really be trusted.
The influencers don't even know what they're defending. They just know fear pays better than the truth. And here the truth. The system was failing long before Trump. Long before Biden. Long before COVID. And maybe, just maybe, this moment is not a crisis, but an opening.
You know, I've said this for months now.
The greatest political opportunity of our lifetime now, is health care reform! Real, actual reform.
Not another Washington quick fix. Not more subsidiary easy or anything else. Not a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. But the Republicans won't do anything about it. I believe, and I say this without hesitation, I think. That Trump and RFK Jr. together may be the only combination force in American politics with the will to take a flamethrower to the bureaucracy, that is choking doctors and nurses. The pharmaceutical lobby, the insurance labyrinth, the 50 states wrapped in 50 different versions of red tape. All of it has to be confronted. And here's why Trump can't afford to miss this: If he solves even a quarter of this problem, if he can find the way to lower costs, if he increases access. If he frees the market to actually work across state lines, he'll not only win in 2026.
He'll be launching a momentum, that will carry Vance into the presidency in 2028.
This is the key here!
But he has to remember something Washington has long forgotten. The people he's negotiating with, they don't want a deal. They don't fear collapse.
They come it. They have been playing a slow motion Colour Revolution. One that the company has to be impoverished. Has to be frightened. And has to be divided to accept the new power structures.
Colour Revolutions only work if your people are hungry, if they're afraid, and they believe the people in the head of the government are authoritarian.
When that happens, you can have a Colour Revolution. And every day, America does not break. Every day, the economy still stands. Every day, people wake up and realize their lives are not as hopeless as the media insists.
The revolutionaries lose their leverage. So the shutdown is not the crisis.
The crisis is the addiction to government medicine. So here's the battle line that matters, I think, most right now: While the press spins, you know, panic, Trump has to gather the brightest minds. The innovators, the disrupters. The people who build things, rather than manage decline. That's what he does best. You know, if Elon Musk could do for NASA, what Washington could not. Then why can't we find. Maybe even get Elon Musk. Why can't we unleash the same kind of thinking on health care.
It's time for radical thinking!
Imagine a system where your doctor spends more time listening, than actually checking boxes.
Imagine competition across state lines. Imagine prices that behave like normal prices because the market is finally allowed to work and government doesn't have its finger on the scale.
Imagine freeing the nurses and the physicians from the paperwork prisons they're in. And letting them practice medicine again.
This isn't utopian. That's just uncaptured America. The America before the bureaucratic glacier, settled over absolutely everything in our lives.
Trump is the one that can do this. He's -- he's hitting home runs, grand slams, all -- all the time.
All the time.
Health care is the crack in the wall, where sunlight is still getting through. If you solve this, if you solve the pressure and you -- you lower the pressure on the engine behind the Colour Revolution, you win!
You win. I'm not even talking about election.
You save the republic.
You solve this.
And you solve the fear that drives half of our political dysfunction.
Washington thinks the shutdown is a battlefield. It's not!
The battlefield is health care. The future is decided there. And the man who breaks that system open. And let's Americans breathe again, will shape this country for a generation.
And the only guy to do it, is Donald Trump.
