UPDATED 11/15: I Agree with Dr. Rachel Bitecofer… And Here’s Why! With Charts!

Seldom to do I pen a post just to quote and recommend the work of another – unless it’s just too good to miss and exactly what I was about to say myself (but probably with more unnecessary words!). Today, political scientist and practitioner Rachel Bitecofer did just that:

When the government reopened, cable pundits called it a cave. Twitter called it surrender. I called it a win—because from where I sit, Democrats didn’t lose the shutdown fight, they won the long game and gave the ACA its only chance of survival. 

The point was never to “hold out” for an Affordable Care Act subsidy extension that Republicans were never going to give in the shutdown. The point was to force them to take ownership of killing it. That’s exactly what just happened.

Now, as December premiums land in mailboxes across America, voters will have one party to blame for the sticker shock. One man, really—Donald J. Trump—and the Republican Party that spent fifteen years promising to repeal and replace the ACA without ever producing a plan that wasn’t a dumpster fire. They voted to gut it once to end the shutdown, and they’ll have to do it again in the glare of public outrage. That’s not losing; that’s setting a trap.

A “Fold” That Sets the Board

There’s this fantasy that if Democrats just “fight like Republicans,” they’d always win but there is something called strategic retreat that is very important if you want to win wars: just ask the Wehrmacht! But here’s the problem: Republicans fight with nihilism, and nihilism works when you don’t care who gets hurt. Democrats govern. There’s a difference.

You can’t negotiate with a man who sued for the right to starve poor children!!

No he has to fix healthcare with no way to actually do it. 

Keeping the government closed would’ve starved SNAP recipients, sidelined veterans’ benefits, and wrecked holiday paychecks for hundreds of thousands of federal workers. Meanwhile, there was no path to restoring ACA subsidies through a shutdown standoff with a MAGA-controlled House. The right move was to reopen government and force Republicans into the impossible position of defending what they just did.

When Speaker Mike Johnson promised a floor vote on Obamacare repeal, he thought it was a victory lap. Within forty-eight hours, he was backpedaling, muttering about “replacement notebooks” and “plans in progress.” 

Translation: there is no plan, there never was, and now the clock is ticking.

They actually have to do something or unleash tsunami of pain for the entire insurance market and its customers. 

Read the rest at Rachel’s excellent Substack newsletter.

But that isn’t all there is to say on the subject, though Rachel does provide most of it in here excellent full post (seriously, go read the whole thing!).

I have seen much pitchfork shaking by Dem leaders and rank-and-file Members and voters decrying those 8 Dems who voted to end the shut down and approve the Trump/MAGA budget specifically, and of our Party in general of being unable to stick to its guns and fight fire with fire. I don’t share this latter viewpoint because of this episode of the shut-down drama; I share that view because it has too often true. However, in this case, I think those eight Senators are taking a bullet for a good cause. Incidentally, my partner in thought crime, David Gordon, seems to be mostly in agreement with me on this, though he doesn’t elaborite his personal views as much, he also went and got a quote directly from the good doctor Bitecofer directly on the matter, exclusive to BlogForArizona:

“I never supported a shutdown because I understood, whether it lasted one day or 100 days, Republicans would never cave in destroying the Obamacare subsidies and now Democrats are seen as caving when they actually walked away with a huge intangible with the promised vote on the subsidies. America needs to see clearly what Republican policies for the working class look like. Now they will.”

Those 8 Senators all have one trait in common: none are facing re-elect in ’26. They clearly calculate that most voters won’t hold a grudge by ’28. One of them (Senator Shaheen) is leaving the Senate and will never face electoral blowback. They are the Senators who were best ABLE to weather any blow back, and thereby give cover to all the rest of the Dem Congresscritters to whine and rage about their ignoble surrender.

Those who are furious about their ‘betrayal’ (which might even include YOU, good reader) are, IMO, simply wrong: they are focused only on the immediate conflict, not the whole strategic war against Trumpism and MAGA. Hear me out with an open mind, I beg.

As Rachel points out, we were NEVER going to win the ACA subsidies back – the MAGA movement does not generally respond rationally to political calculus. They have tried dozens of times to kill the ACA, but this time they have succeeded in dealing the ACA a potentially deadly blow (I will write something about how that might come about and link it to this post this weekend). The absolute best we could hope to do strategically in this fight was clearly place the onus for the millions who will suffer economic pain or lose their health coverage squarely on the Trump/MAGA/GOP.

Most of our Dem electeds are secretly relieved by this move by the ‘traitorous 8’. They still get to amplify the message about MAGA’s betrayal of ACA users and condemn the ‘traitorous 8’ for a betrayal, even as they set the political field in a strategically advantageous manner as we enter to ’26 mid-term cycle. Every un-brainwashed voter now knows that the pain they are going to be feeling very soon is the fault of Trump and his MAGA mob’s budget.

Dear reader, don’t mourn the possible death of the ACA too much. Yes, it is called Obamacare and, yes, it helped millions get healthcare at an affordable price, and, yes, millions will suffer as a result in the short-term, but it was never a truly Democratic project; it was a plan invented by a very conservative think tank, and implemented by then Republican Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, and picked up by Obama as they only thing he could actually pass that might help get more folks coverage.

The ACA was always a massive subsidy to middleman insurance companies, as much as it was a aid to Americans needing healthcare coverage. It was a market-based solution when the market IS THE DAMN PROBLEM with the American healthcare system to begin with! The ACA was an irrational and wasteful approach to reducing the non-insured population: about 14% hadn’t any coverage before the ACA, about 8% now don’t after implementation and over more than a decade. So, it wasn’t even that great at its stated goal.

While the shut-down fight has been bruising, elected Dems chose their battleground wisely. Most voters wanted the ACA subsidies to continue, and most rightly blame the MAGAts and Trump for the damage that will be done by ending the ACA subsidies

The Republican critique of the ACA – ironically – is correct, leftist, and populist: the ACA IS a giant inefficient subsidy of insurance companies. We should be seeking to ELIMINATE the parasitic insurance company middle men to reduce costs, not subsidizing them. We should eventually agree with MAGA that ACA has to be replaced in favor of something better. Trump and MAGA obviously haven’t ANY plan on how to do that; fortunately, we do – Medicare for All.

Medicare for All in some form is the most reasonable, financially realistic, morally correct, and now potentially politically viable goal to pursue long-term for Democrats who want to reduce medical costs for our entire society, and eliminate the problem of folks who haven’t any healthcare access. This ‘surrender’ actually puts us on a political course that COULD possibly end up with a universal coverage plan that can pass with broad, bi-partisan support – if we play our cards right.

The start is to make heathcare access and cost once again the major issue at the heart of the national political conversation. We can WIN that conversation with voters: they simply trust our Party way more on the subject.

Big and permanent changes to policy in a democracy requires pretty broad consesus. We might even be able to win many traditional Republicans and conservative populists to our side on this subject. We can ride that victory in public opinion towards retaking the House, and maybe even the Senate in ’26, and the Presidency in ’28 – provided we Dems fight like hell against the destruction of our civil rights – including the right to vote and fair and transparent voting procedures – like voters want us to do. The fights to preserve our freedoms and rights matter FAR more than discrete policies, right now. Policies can be changed with majorities – but you can’t win majorities without civil rights and functioning democracy.

We face an existensial crisis as a democracy with the Trump Regime, and a lot the furniture of our Republic is going to be damaged or destroyed in the fracas to come. One casualty might well be the ACA, and that’s one fixture I will not mourn if it gets wrecked.

Keep your eyes on the long-term goals: preserving genuine democracy and civil rights and freedoms as the foundation of our political lives, preventing the Democratic Party from being permanently shut out of power, and destroying and banishing the MAGA/QAnon cult from our political culture. To accomplish those goals we may have to make serious and painful sacrifices in the short term – such as the viability of the ACA. If that comes to pass, and is generally held to be the fault of Trump and MAGA, and demand rises for a better path forward to keep Americans healthy, that is all to our advantage in the long term.

Those 8 Senators might be wiser and cannier than those of us who only see the short term wins and loses. This shutdown fight might look like one we ‘lost’ in the short tem, but, IMO, may be turned into a major victory in the long term.