GOP’s only healthcare plan is to kill Obamacare

For millions of Americans, Jan. 1 won't be an occasion to celebrate the coming of the new year. It will be an occasion for dread.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK COLUMNIST

The reason is the impending termination of crucial premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans. Without a last-minute agreement between congressional Democrats and Republicans, the subsidy structure that has been in place since 2021 will revert to the original arrangement written into the act in 2010.

Millions of Americans dependent on the ACA will face potentially ruinous increases in coverage costs. Many will have to drop their coverage. That process will leave those with the most urgent and costly treatments in the ACA, and those who think they can get away with dropping insurance — or simply can’t afford it — on the outs. The result will be a sicker coverage cohort, which will raise prices for everybody.

The current stalemate is the offspring of the GOP’s 15-year campaign to undermine — really, to kill — Obamacare.

Republicans have dressed up their attack on the ACA with reams of empty rhetoric. They habitually call the ACA a “disaster,” without offering a cogent explanation of why.

Plainly, they see Obamacare as a nice, juicy partisan target, but they’re not reading the room. The ACA’s popularity has steadily increased since mid-2016; in KFF’s most recent tracking poll, taken in September, favorable opinion swamped unfavorable opinion 64% to 35%.

Americans have voted for the ACA with their feet. Since 2018, enrollment in Obamacare plans has more than doubled, from 11.4 million to 24.3 million this year, with a notable enrollment increase starting in 2021, when the premium subsidy structure was improved. That’s the change due to expire Dec. 31 (Republicans, please note). The enrollment figure doesn’t include the 16.7 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid under ACA expansion rules — a provision still rejected by benighted political leaders in 10 red states.