Senator Johnson Argues Democrats Using Shutdown to Hide Obamacare Premium Increases

Let us examine the facts surrounding the government shutdown, which has now stretched nearly a month. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has offered a theory that deserves serious consideration: Democrats are leveraging this shutdown to obscure the fundamental failures of the Affordable Care Act.

The logic here is straightforward. Democrats have been extending enhanced healthcare subsidies that were implemented during COVID-19 as temporary measures. These subsidies were always scheduled to expire. Why the desperate push to maintain them? Because without these subsidies, Americans would see the true cost of their Obamacare premiums, which have skyrocketed due to the law’s faulty design.

This is not speculation. This is cause and effect.

Before Obamacare, approximately 12 million Americans held individual policies. These were short-term plans for people between jobs or seeking flexible coverage options. The market offered variety and competition. Then came the Affordable Care Act, which decimated this market through heavy-handed regulation.

The law eliminated high-risk pools, short-term plans, and catastrophic care plans. It forced those 12 million Americans into the Obamacare framework and made them shoulder the full cost of covering pre-existing conditions. Rather than tweaking existing high-risk pools to spread costs across the broader population, Democrats chose a centralized approach that inevitably drove up premiums for everyone in the individual market.

The numbers do not lie. Premiums have increased dramatically. The “Affordable” Care Act has proven decidedly unaffordable for millions of Americans.

Now Democrats face a political problem of their own making. If the enhanced subsidies expire, Americans will see their true premium costs, and the failure of Obamacare will become undeniable. So what is the Democratic strategy? Extend the subsidies indefinitely and blame Republicans for any resulting premium increases.

This is textbook misdirection. Create a problem through poor policy design, temporarily mask that problem with subsidies, then claim your political opponents are responsible when those subsidies cannot continue forever.

Senator Johnson noted that much of the legacy media has been complicit in this narrative, though he suggested their credibility may be wearing thin with the American public. One can only hope.

The solution here is not more government spending to cover up government failure. The solution is free market reform. Allow competition. Remove unnecessary regulations. Let Americans choose the coverage that works for their individual circumstances rather than forcing them into a one-size-fits-all government scheme.

Republicans must hold firm on this issue. The political pressure will be intense. Democrats will deploy every rhetorical weapon in their arsenal, accusing Republicans of wanting to strip healthcare from vulnerable Americans. This is the standard playbook.

But Republicans cannot capitulate. Throwing more taxpayer money at a fundamentally flawed system only delays the inevitable reckoning while making the eventual crisis worse. This is basic economics.

The Affordable Care Act was built on faulty premises. It ignored market realities. It prioritized ideological goals over practical outcomes. And now, more than a decade later, we are still dealing with the consequences of that legislative overreach.

Americans deserve better than political theater designed to obscure policy failures. They deserve honest accounting of what works and what does not. The evidence is clear: Obamacare has failed the individual insurance market. No amount of enhanced subsidies or shutdown blame-shifting will change that fundamental reality.