After the Shutdown, the Next Crisis Appears 

The long federal shutdown was broken without Republican compromise. Longtime Washington watchers, accustomed to Republicans caving early from fear that the Democrats would win the PR game, were pleasantly surprised to see that the GOP didn’t give in on anything serious this time. 

Compliments to Senator Thune and his leadership team; keeping this herd of kittens together for this long couldn’t have been easy. 

But this doesn’t mean that the underlying problems go away. The Democrats wanted more welfare for the illegal aliens, and more subsidies for Obamacare, and these problems still need resolution. 

The administration has a solution in place for the illegal aliens, at least: ramping up the tools to encourage self-deportation.  

 Between free flights out and a semi-amnesty for people who register and leave willingly on good terms, the number of illegal aliens with their hands out for the Democrats’ beloved food stamps is dwindling. That helps. 

 Now, the big challenge is Obamacare. 

 We all recall how, back in 2010, Congressional Democrats did the focus group shuffle and determined that they needed to massage the numbers so that a balloon payment for nationalized health insurance would hit us ten years in the future, or they could never have force-fed Obamacare down the nation’s throat. 

 We should also remember how, after those ten years were up, back in 2020, Congressional Democrats used Covid-19 to justify all sorts of health-related cash-shoveling, into insurance company coffers and pharmaceutical maker coffers, into city and state governments and Wall Street cronies’ tax dodges, using the pandemic to kick the Obamacare can down the road another five years. 

 Well, now those five years are up too, and everyone who buys insurance through the government-subsidized marketplace is about to learn, to their horror, just how much Obamacare really costs. 

 America was told that Obamacare would lower prices, improve care, and preserve the greatest healthcare system in history. 

All it really did was chase good doctors out of the profession, cause thousands of hospitals and clinics to close, and cause the prices of both insurance and actual care to skyrocket faster than ever. 

 Regular corporate employees going through open enrollment this fall are seeing increases in their share of their insurance cost; as usual, their employers are seeing much bigger increases in their share of the cost. 

 But for the rest of us – the self-employed, the unemployed, and the many who must now buy insurance from the Obamacare marketplace – the cost increase for 2026 is absolutely crippling. 

 The easy solution would be to pour in another stopgap – another inflationary influx of money we don’t have, making this expensive disaster look “sort of” affordable for one more year.  

The Democrats would love it, and it would put the issue behind us for a year, without really solving anything. 

 We must resist that temptation. 

The Republicans already know what we need to do, in order to improve the healthcare funding problem.  We spent the first decade of the 21st century carefully debating the various aspects of this massive issue, until the Democratic Party used their power to shut down all debate and nationalize health insurance in 2009-2010 with the establishment of their precious albatross, the Affordable Care Act. 

So we have lost fifteen years now… but we can pick up where we left off. That part isn’t hard.  The hard part is getting something significant done by year-end, so that 2026 isn’t any more painful than it absolutely has to be, as a result. 

Here are some of the biggies: 

• Crack down on fraud. 

• Reduce crime-caused healthcare needs (drug overdoses, shootings, rapes, stabbings, murders) by cracking down on crime, especially gang crime, and locking up the convicted perpetrators for lifetimes rather than for minutes. 

• Reduce the number of people illegally in the country who use healthcare without paying, forcing the rest of the system to absorb their costs. 

• Improve the economy: every person who moves off the exchanges or off the dole, and into a normal full-time job’s private health insurance program, is another incremental reduction in the burden on Obamacare. 

 Notice that we are already working on these four measures, and making great progress already. Notice also that these four measures are all societal positives, independent of the healthcare crisis.   

 Reducing fraud, violent crime and drug abuse, expelling millions of illegal aliens, and accomplishing private sector job growth are all important goals on their own.  The fact that all of them also help with the Obamacare funding problem is just icing on the cake. 

 The next pieces of the puzzle are harder to accomplish: 

 Lower the cost of malpractice insurance (the single greatest cost for many medical professionals, which necessarily drives up their rates) through tort reform. 

• Reduce the types of coverage mandated to be included in every healthcare plan (such as annual checkups, maternity coverage, elective plastic surgery, transsexual surgery and the resulting lifetime treatment, etc.).  The more expensive things a basket must include, naturally, the more expensive that basket will be. 

• Allow more tax-deductible flexibility in how employers can offer benefits to their employees.  

• Allow insurers to offer more imaginative blends of programs – a pay-your-way discount program for routine services, plus a high-deductible catastrophic insurance plan for severe illnesses, plus health savings accounts and more.   

 Much of this is already happening, and varies from state to state; we need much more of it.  Much of it was already in place twenty years ago; Obamacare killed it and we just need to bring it back. 

 The challenge with this part of the puzzle is that most insurance regulations are managed at the state level; while it is a political reality that the public will blame the feds, it’s really not a federal responsibility, and many of the solutions are out of Washington’s hands. 

 While we obviously mustn’t have the federal government nationalize any more of the economy than it already has, whatever the federal government can legally do to increase private sector options, and to reward the insurance and healthcare industries for bringing costs down, is worth attempting. 

 We can do it in phases; a good Step One by year end, perhaps, then make Step Two a campaign issue for 2026.  But we definitely must show some serious improvement quickly. 

 Remember how big a part of the cost of American health care is directly caused by crime, unemployment, and the illegal alien population. 

 The Obama and Biden eras saw an increase of tens of millions of illegal aliens, along with a formal campaign in most of our big cities to refuse to prosecute or imprison most criminals.   

 So of course we’ve seen our emergency rooms packed as a result – packed with bullet-riddled and drug-addicted patients who cost much more to treat and have no means of paying. 

 As imperfect as our insurance panoply is, we wouldn’t have a healthcare funding problem at all, if only our medical system and our governments weren’t forced to cover the medical costs caused by our massive criminal and illegal alien populations. 

 This isn’t necessarily obvious, but once it’s explained to the public that we all have to share in the cost of those millions of uninsured gunshot wounds, overdoses, maternities, and more, anyone can understand what the first goal of the federal government has to be, if we ever want to get our nation’s medical costs under control. 

 As always, the Democratic Party makes the mess, and the Republican Party has to clean it up.   

 After over a century and a half, we should be used to it by now. 

 Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo 

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant.  President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.         

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