Shutdown Shenanigans: How to Make Sense of GOP’s Talking Points

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FEATURING DEAN BAKER - On October 28, a month into the federal government shutdown, the United States Senate voted for the 13th time on a funding bill to reopen the government. Senate Republicans needed five more Democrats Senators to join them in order to pass the resolution but the opposition party has held firm–for now. 

Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump want to strip government subsidies from health insurance premiums for plans obtained through the Affordable Care Act but Democrats are refusing. Meanwhile, in response to the deadlock, Americans enrolled under the ACA are already being notified of huge increases to their premiums, a real-time demonstration of the GOP’s desires. 

Trump and the Republican Party currently have no plan to control rising healthcare costs and early on, pivoted to making wild and false claims about Democrats holding out to preserve insurance coverage for undocumented people.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He recently wrote a clear explanation of the shutdown and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about it.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I think it's so important for people to really be clear because they're getting such false information from the government. For example, if you go to the USDA's own website right now, at the very top is a banner that says “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as SNAP. Bottom line: The well has run dry.” I mean, that's just the USDA. 

And of course, Republicans in the Senate are also making wild claims. They claim that health insurance premiums would rise no matter what. 

So, let's talk about what's really going on. What is it that Republicans want to do? What are they holding out for? 

Dean Baker: Well, there are two things going on here. One is that they do, as you had mentioned earlier, they wanted to basically gut the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act. They aren't gonna eliminate them altogether 'cause there were subsidies that were put into the act when was first passed back in 2010. 

The immediate issue are the expanded subsidies that were put in place under President Biden during the COVID period, which made it much more affordable, both for people at the low ends. You have a lot of people that, in states where they didn't expand Medicaid, where this allowed them to get coverage for free. And these are low-income people, say 130% of the poverty level. So even paying a hundred, $200 a month for insurance was a really big deal. That's what they faced before that. Those were part of the expanded subsidies, which the Republicans wanna eliminate.