GOP Health Care Passes House — Can It Pass The Senate?

Instead of Obamacare being the club with which Dems beat the GOP into submission, Republicans held the line and exposed the ASA for the Ponzi Scheme it always was.

It was never ‘affordable’. It was always just a shell game of hiding the expense from the consumer while premiums keep going up and Insurance companies made out like bandits.

For 15 long years, Americans have paid the price for the Unaffordable Care Act.

Marketplace premiums are UP 80% since 2014. Analysts estimate 6.4 MILLION ineligible enrollments, and a new report confirms the Democrats’ system lacks even BASIC guardrails against fraud, waste, and… pic.twitter.com/SIhn1ao1sN

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) December 17, 2025

But what Republican vote would be complete without a few renegades losing their nerve and voting to keep the Democrat plans alive? Four Republicans joined with Democrats to force a discharge petition so that a vote to extend the COVID-era — I say again COVID-era subsidies –that sunset exactly when Dem-sponsored legislation wanted it to, on Dec 31st of this year.

But suddenly it’s urgent that we pass an extention for a bill Dems wanted to see sunset. Could it have something to do with never wanting these to be temporary in the first place? Yeah, I’m thinking so.

In the GOP’s reply to that ‘clean’ 3-year extension of (and hear the irony when I say this) massive federal subsidies to prop up the Affordable Care Act we are looking at a different approach to the same problem.

Instead of dumping ever-increasing money into unaffordable plans that don’t give the coverage you actually want, we’re looking at an option that puts taxpayers in control of their own allocated health care funds, while letting small groups of individuals and businesses band together and benefit from bulk prices in much the same way that ordinary people can get wholesale prices from Costco or Sam’s Club.

Do Democrats dare to stand opposed to this kind of an empowering solution in an election year? Or is their cynical commitment to leveraging harm given to the American taxpayer to achieve desirable political outcomes even more sinister than what was exposed during the shutdown when holding back SNAP benefits so that stated goals like partisan NGOs and NPR getting federal funding restored?

The red line they tried to hold — until they finally blinked — was a massive extension of the Obamacare subsidy, when we’re already adding a trillion to the debt every few months.

If the goal was breaking the private health care option to force the adoption of single-payer systems like the UK’s NHS or Canadian ‘health care’ (which currently features Medical Assistance in Dying now ranking as one of the top-five causes of death)… the GOP’s option that empowers the customer will throw a serious roadblock in that plan.

If Schumer decides to block this bill, he can. But that has two kinds of consequences — on one side, he is once again leveraging the pain of American taxpayers, and whether GOP finds a work-around or not, you can bet your bottom dollar Dem opposition to this bill would be hung like an albatross around his party’s neck in the election cycle.

On the other hand, if Schumer filibusters this, it might be exactly the moral high ground excuse the GOP is looking for to end the filibuster without looking like the bad guy.

And once the filibuster is gone, there’s no stopping the GOP from finally implementing the sort of changes conservatives have longed for for years.

Imagine for example if they ended income tax and the fed, so Dems could no longer bloat the government with unsustainable programs, since there would be no mechanism to endlessly fleece the taxpayer.

Or if they returned most federal land to the states, with a promised percentage of any future profit taken in by commercial leases or sales? Or if they slashed the federal government to a fraction of its current size, reducing redundancy and automating unnecessary clerk and filing roles? Or finished the job getting the Federal government out of the (failed) education game entirely.

If Schumer presses his luck with blocking much-needed health care reforms, he might just (to borrow a phrase) ‘unleash the whirlwind’.