one last one on the healthcare issue. Cutting back MA plans was a trend thats been accelerated. 
The reason i support universal care, other than for common decency reasons, is that it is cheaper when done right, if only because of the diversification of everyone in the insured pool and contributing over their lifetimes. Without that, you have only the sickest who want plans, and those who dont still get the healthcare they need via the most expensive point of care - the ER. That typically results in much higher bad debt expense for the provider, who pass it on to the insured with higher premiums. 

I think the weight of the shutdown, or at least not agreeing to the temporary spending gap, does fall more on the shoulders of schumer and the democrats.
As someone who is for universal healthcare, ACA has been gutted by the republicans, notably the elimination of the individual mandate...it may be time to go back to the drawing board, rather that continuing to prop-up this dead effort. 


The federal government just accumulated an additional $2 trillion in debt over the last 12 months. That's the kind of debt surge America usually racks up in wartime or during major national emergencies. But today, as Republicans and Democrats engage in another budget-driven shutdown drama, we are not at war. There is no pandemic. The economy is humming. And another shutdown is happening. Yet it will solve nothing about the fact that the political class is burning through money at a pace that would make former President Franklin D. Roosevelt's war cabinet blush.

Even if President Donald Trump collects every dollar of his "emergency" tariffs, the federal debt-to-gross-domestic-product (GDP) ratio would still climb above 124 percent by 2035. Remember that most of that revenue is paid by Americans, not foreigners—and that the tariffs' growth-dampening effects offset much of the revenue in the first place.

Democrats, for their part, are pushing back by demanding even more permanent spending. Senate Democrats just blocked a clean continuing resolution to simply carry forward former President Joe Biden's spending levels from December 2024. As a result, the government is shut down. Why? To leverage the threat, and now the pain, of a shutdown into $1.5 trillion in new entitlements, including making Obamacare emergency subsidy expansions permanent.

That's not reform. It doesn't shrink government. It doesn't impose discipline. It wastes more money while the unchecked growth of entitlement and subsidy programs goes unaddressed. The resolution carrying forward Biden's high spending numbers for seven weeks was far from ideal. But it was the least bad option: It would have avoided a shutdown, bought time, and not added new entitlements.

MAGA math/meth