The Health Care Fight That Could Hit Voters in 2026

The Senate deadlocked on competing proposals related to expiring Affordable Care act subsidies. According to the Times, Democrats pushed to extend the subsidies. You may have remembered that during the shutdown, Republicans offered an alternative approach centered on health savings accounts and direct payments for basic plans. Neither reached the 60 votes needed to advance. This reopens a long running political reality. Republicans have promised an alternative to the Affordable Health Care act for roughly 15 years. The promise of a replacement has been repeated for about a decade by President Trump as well. We're going to come up with something much, much better, much greater, cheaper, and it's coming soon. Saying that for a decade. But there's never been a stable, detailed consensus replacement or Republican republic replacement enacted or even mentioned beyond a simple talking point. When you strip away all slogans. The menu of real health system structures kind of limited. A single payer approach like many wealthy countries use. That's one option. A mixed public private option like the Affordable Health Care act, so called Obamacare, which preserves a large role for insurers or continued fragmentation. Essentially nothing which costs remain high. Where costs remain high, coverage remains uneven and premiums keep rising. Meanwhile, the United States spends far more on health care than pure economy by share of the economy, while often underperforming on outcome. What's the real message here? Once again, the Senate couldn't come up with a solution to health care premiums that are about to double for 20 million Americans coming up in the next year. They're still waiting on this new Republican health care plan that's going to solve all the problems. Guess what? It didn't come 10 years ago, it didn't come five years ago, it didn't come today. It's never coming. There is no plan. Let's dig a little bit deeper here, okay? This is where I consider myself a true conservative, not one of these fake conservative conservatives. I like to conserve money from my own pocketbook. I like to conserve money from the pocketbook of the federal government. How do you do that? One of the things we hear from conservatives all the time is, you know, these liberals, these progressives, they, they live in their theoretical ivory tower. They don't look at what really works in the real world. Well, I do look at what works in the real world. Look at the other G7 nations. I'm not talking about Cuba, I'm talking about Venezuela. I'm talking about wealthy, prosperous nations. Wealthy, prosperous capitalistic nations. What do they do? They provide health care for all of their citizens in the very same way we provide military protection for all of Our citizens, we provide federal roads for our citizens. We provide public education through the 12th grade to our. We just, we do it as a society through the government. So they do it, and they spend trillions of dollars less money than the United States in the aggregate. Most civilized, capitalistic rich countries that you might want to live in someday and certainly visit, they spend about $6,500 a year per person on health care. And because we believe in the free market system, because we don't want evil socialized medicine, we spend $13,000 person on average. So, yes, theirs is 50% less than what ours is. Ours is 100% more than what they spent. If you're good at math, you figured that out. So that's why I consult. I consider myself a conservative. I don't like wasting money. It would be far more efficient for the United States government to end this deluded fantasy that we live in a free market, private, privatized health care system. We don't. Our health care system is already socialized. It's just socialized to, to give a lot of health insurance companies more money, a lot of doctors more money, a lot of marketers more money, and to stick it to you with the tab. That's what we have. So believe it or not, President Trump is not wrong occasionally. Right? He's not wrong when he says Obamacare was a giveaway to the big insurance companies. Well, it was, because guess what? If you go from the system we had 15 years ago, 10 years ago, even today, to, to moving automatically in one day or one week, to a system of the government paying for it the way they do in Canada and Great Britain and most of Europe, boom. You do completely decimate the insurance industry. You put millions out of work, and a lot of them are really rich and powerful and vote and give campaign contributions. So it's completely true that Obamacare is sort of this hybrid way of trying to keep people happy in the short term. So that part is on. But it's not honest when Trump and all the Republicans continue to say, well, we have a plan, it's coming soon. It's, it's been coming for 15 years. They've never once come up with it. So a little fundamental education here, folks. If you live in the real world, as conservatives claim they do, if your, if your head is out of the ivory tower and you're looking at what actually works in the real world, there's three types of health care systems in the world. There's the single payer plan, where, just as you already do for national Defense and police protection and roads and parks and schools. You have the government as the main purchaser to give most people what they need. And then for the very wealthy, they can opt out and get some private care. That's one option. That's what most successful capitalistic economies do. You've got another option where there's this mix of public private, where there's insurance companies and there's some subsidies going back and forth. That's what Obamacare was. And you can make the case that's kind of what Switzerland does a few other places. And then you've got what most of the developing world has, which is, hey, you're on your own. If you're poor, just die. Let's go back to the way the world was from about 6,000 BC to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and you just die at age 30, 33. You get a cut, an infection, no health care, no antibiotics, just die. That's kind of the third option. So that's the world we live in. And to continue to say there's some easy private sector solution. There isn't. There absolutely isn't. Now, you could take the exact same attitude and say, hey, I've got a plan to save hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayers. Hey, that sounds pretty good. TJ what's your plan? Maybe we have you run for Congress. Here's my plan. I want to get rid of the big bloated government waste of police departments in America and state highway patrols and the FBI. I want to get rid of all that. It's all government bureaucrats. It's all a bunch of lazy people on the government payroll. Let's fire all of them and let's just privatize security. It works fine for Mitt Romney. You may remember the former senator was getting a lot of death threats because he had the goal to vote to impeach President Trump in the first term. So he had a solution. He had a nice private sector Solution. He spent $5,000 a day of his own money because he's worth half a billion dollars. And he hired private security guards to follow him and his family around, you know, 189 grandchildren. Presumably some of them needed protection and they were kept safe. As far as I know, nothing bad happened to him. He. He had private security. He spent $5,000. If it works for Mitt Romney, why couldn't it work for you? H. What? Oh, you're telling me you don't have $5,000 a day to spend private security? Okay, wow. I hadn't thought of that maybe there's some flaws in my rationale. Well, guess what is ridiculous as I just sounded there. That is essentially the argument against national health. Now, I understand politically, if you're a Democrat, you say, well, oh, D.J. don't talk about national health care. It's going to make the, the voters angry and they're going to think we're socialist. They're going to think we're Fidel Castro if we talk about socialized healthcare. Don't talk about it. T.J. well, I'm not here trying to help any one party. I'm here telling you straight what is really going on in the world. And what's going on in the world is you're being played. You're being played like a fiddle by politicians. In this case, with respect to health care, it is by politicians who want to scare you and waste your money and steal your money at the same time. And Republicans who have done nothing but denounce Obamacare for the last 15 years and say we got something better. Coming up, private sector. Well, let's be clear on what the private sector is. It's going to be exactly the same private sector solution that Mitt Romney has for police protection for his family. It's called pull out your checkbook and write a check for $5,000 a day. Now, at some point, if I told you I'm running on a platform of balancing the budget and I've got a plan telling you exactly what I'm going to cut, and 15 years later, 10 years, 15 years later, I haven't told you a single thing I'm going to cut. At some point, I think you would say, well, T.J. you're a fraud. We don't believe you. You've had opportunity after opportunity to tell us one thing you would cut in the federal government and you've never done it. So you have no credibility on the issue of, of reducing government spending and bringing about a balanced budget, you would be absolutely right. But for some reason, people give Trump and the Republicans a free pass on this health care issue. Well, I think that's about to end come January. Don't listen to me. Don't listen to Democrats. Don't listen to msnbc. Just listen to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from Northwest Georgia and the situation with her own children who are about to see their health care costs double. She has children mid-20s. Presumably they're not wealthy yet. They didn't get all the great stock buying tips that Marjorie Taylor Greene has had in recent years. So they're not rich. And we're going to see a lot of Americans just like them seeing their health care cost go up 100%. And this time, the message is owned by the Republicans. And I got to tell you, there are a lot of Democrats who are saying publicly, oh, it's awful that so many Americans, tens of millions of Americans are losing their health care. And it's awful that we tried to shut down the government, the Republicans didn't give us what we want, because it's really going to hurt tens of millions of Americans who are going to lose health care because they can't afford it. But privately, I'm going to tell you what they're thinking. They're thinking, oh, this is fantastic. This is going to help us so much in the 2026 elections. There are going to be tens of millions of Americans who are, who either didn't vote in 2024 or voted for Republicans or they're going to be so angry, they're going to be poor, they are not going to be able to sleep at night because they no longer have health insurance. So they realize they're only one car accident away. They're one diagnosis away from bankruptcy, losing their home and going from the middle class to a wretched poverty state. And those people are either not going to vote for Republicans again or and stay at home or they're going to vote for Democrats. So I'm just telling you like it is. There are a lot of Democrats who, frankly, bad for the country, but think it's the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party. What's going to happen next year with so many people realizing, you know, all this rhetoric about government waste. Yeah, I buy into it until you, until my health care costs go up an extra thousand dollars a month. Now it's getting real and now it's getting painful. So that's what's happening with these subsidies. Because it's not a matter of Democrats somehow compromising. It's a matter of basic math. Again, there's three types of health care in the real world. If you actually get out of the ivory tower, if you get out of the Hoover Institute or the Claremont Institute or the Milton Friedman School of ivory towers in Chicago, there's only three solutions to health care. The government pays. You got some mixed system, which Obamacare is, or you're on your own, die. Those are the three choices. And there's no amount of speeches, sound bites that can really change that reality.