The issue of Obamacare and the massive cost of healthcare plans under it continues to roil American politics, and Democrats have, as such, continued to face criticism for creating an essentially unworkable system that was reliant on massive subsidies to hide its true cost and is now floundering as a result of those subsidies going away.
Such is what happened when former Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) appeared on the Friday, January 2, broadcast of C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire” amd explained how he had fought against the creation of and extension of Obamacare subsidies because the law should instead have just been fixed, but the idea of fixing it was anathema to his then-party members.
As the former senator who ditched the Democrats and became an independent before eventually leaving the US Senate for good put it, the Democrats in the legislature wanted to just forever extend the subsidies rather than deal with the hard work of fixing it, meaning they wasted time that should have been spent on finding a way to solve the problem.
Commenting on the matter when speaking on CSAPN, the former senator first explained that he was against extending the Obamacare subsidies once Covid was over, as the point was to deal with healthcare during the pandemic, not forever subsidize the broken system. He said, “I was right in the middle of that when they were extending…and I didn’t want to even extend it at all. I said, you all should have fixed it by now. We — basically, COVID is over with, let’s go back to pre-COVID.”
Continuing, he noted that the lawmakers involved just wanted to keep endlessly extending the subsidy program so as to avoid having to make a real decision that might come back to bite them or require real work, saying, “They didn’t want to do that. They wanted to extend it and extend it forever.”
As a result, he said, the time they might have had to fix the problem has dwindled precipitously, as they just sat around instead of even trying to find a way to fix it. He said, “So, while we were negotiating, we said, well, you have one year to fix it, you all have been sitting on your butts, not doing anything for a year, knowing this is going to hit you.”
Then, noting why the subsidies randomly ended in 2025, well after the Covid pandemic and a year after they were supposed to expire, he noted that the legislators involved simply didn’t want to have to deal with the problem when an election was on the line, as the whole situation is very unpopular with the American people, and so they extended it a year to avoid that.
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He said, on that point, “I said, listen, ‘one more year and you should have it done.’ They said, ‘oh, no, no, we can’t do it during the election year of 2024, let’s go out and extend it to 2025.’ That was the consolation. That was the reason it was done to 2025, just to get it out of the election year 2024.”
Watch him here: