General Discussion

If all you focus on is the negative, especially when being inaccurate, you lead yourself into fear. Yes the self-insured market is going to suffer, but continuing the same path is just kicking the can down the road. We did that in 2022, and it is biting people in the ass today.

You also haven't explained how in the minority we were going to achieve what we couldn't in the majority. How was holding out going to magically change the makeup of Congress? Was Congress suddenly going to act like they just heard of the premium increases if we waited another week or months? If you are insisting that ending the extended subsidies will kill the self-insured market, wasn't that pretty set after the 2024 elections?

It's easy to throw stones. You and I didn't have to be responsible for making the call. No constituent is calling me up because they didn't get SNAP or they were furloughed while the government was shut down. But unless you have a plausible scenario for getting the subsidies that's more realistic than holding out, your contentions don't seem to be a fair estimate of where things would have gone. Sometimes different paths lead to the same destination. I don't see how an even longer shutdown was likely to change things.