Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that, among other things, stops cost-sharing payments to insurance companies. The purpose of these payments is to lower the deductibles and co-pays for lower- and middle-income Americans purchasing health plans on the Obamacare insurance exchanges. Those lower- and middle-income purchasers will keep getting the benefits of reduced prices, but insurers won’t get any help from the federal government—which the president’s mostly Democratic critics point out will mean higher insurance premiums for everyone.
The payments were unconstitutional, it should be noted. Most payments mandated by the Affordable Care Act don’t require yearly appropriation. But the cost-sharing payments do, and the executive branch has no authority by itself to appropriate money. That’s why the Obama administration initially sought congressional approval for the cost-sharing. Congress refused, and Obama ordered the payments anyway. (A federal judge has already ruled the payments to be illegal, but the decision is under appeal.)
On the question of whether discontinuance of cost-sharing payments will drive people from insurance exchanges and force providers to raise premiums on everyone, as Democrats prophesy, we profess agnosticism. Assuming Congress can’t come to a deal to authorize the payments, and assuming insurers fail in their attempt to sue the government into compliance with their wishes, the outcome will involve some pain for insurance companies. Premiums may rise to the degree Democrats predict, but they may not, for the simple reason that insurance companies are still accountable to their customers (though that accountability dwindles with every new government intervention). Like so many components of the bewildering mess of a law known as the Affordable Care Act, no one really knows what will happen if you alter a single piece of it.
What’s most striking to us about this imbroglio is the degree to which Democrats no longer have the slightest problem with sending massive amounts of public money to large corporations. It’s so routine nowadays you hardly notice it, but the spectacle is remarkable all the same: Congressional Democrats are falling all over themselves to denounce the administration for cutting off payments to multibillion-dollar companies run by CEOs with private jets and million-dollar bonus packages.
We’re not libertarian purists, and we do not denounce every point of contact between government and the private sector. But we remember a time when only a certain kind of “pro-business” Republican would shamelessly make the case for subsidizing corporations. Maybe it started with the “bailouts” of 2008 and 2009—first the banks, then the auto industry. Or maybe it was all those power companies that received massive federal grants for “green energy” projects as part of the 2009 stimulus bill. By the time of the 2015 vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank—a government agency that subsidizes U.S. exporters by loaning money to their foreign buyers—only one Democrat in the House, Alan Grayson of Florida, and only one Democrat in the Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, had the gumption to vote “nay.” By contrast, 117 House Republicans and 28 Senate Republicans did so.
Democrats are now the party of the big corporations. They don’t even debate the subject. Could that have anything to do with the feeling among many left-wing voters that the party has left its working-class, common-man roots?
