Buddy Carter, why do you persist in sending lies in your Congressional newsletter? Isn’t the purpose of these newsletters to inform rather than misinform?
Your recent newsletter takes aim at Democrats during the shutdown. You claim that Democrats are keeping the government shutdown in order to provide subsidies for healthcare for undocumented migrants.
You wrote:
Democrats, including Schumer and Jon Ossoff, have now voted for the fourth time to shut down the government, demanding $1.5 trillion in new partisan spending, including nearly $200 billion in taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants.
That partisan spending you’re talking about, is subsidies necessary to keep Affordable Care Act insurance policies affordable for primarily middle class US Citizens and lawfully present migrants. These subsidies were passed into law during the COVID epidemic but now they’re terminating at the end of 2025. This will drive up the cost of health insurance policies for US citizens and lawfully present migrants by an average of 114%. That’s well over double, which most US Citizens and lawfully present migrants can’t afford.
I keep repeating US citizens and lawfully present migrants, because the Affordable Care Act provides health insurance for US Citizens and lawfully present immigrants, only, as this fact check carefully notes.
Now, there is a law, called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTLA), signed into law by Ronald Reagan decades ago that does allocate a small amount of Medicaid funds to reimburse hospitals for treating anyone and everyone in an emergency life-saving scenario regardless of the person’s status. So, if an undocumented migrant shows up at the hospital with his hand cut off because he’s operating machinery no US citizen wants to operate, the ER has to save his life.
Now, I realize that you may prefer that this person die. I hope, though, as a country we’ve not fallen so far as to wish death on people in this country solely because of the promise of an American dream.
Regardless of the moral ambiguity of letting people die in the street, what the Democrats are pushing for has nothing to do with the EMTLA and everything to do with helping middle class folk, like your voters, afford the premiums for healthcare.
Of course, you think of me as a screaming radical leftist and therefore beneath your interest, even though you are my elected representative, which means you’re supposed to represent people like me. Still, because of your partisan approach to leading, you may discount what I say. Well, that’s fine. So let’s look to someone else who you might find worth your time.
Let’s look to the insurance commissioner for the state of Georgia, who has joined with other insurance commissioner of every single state, in sending to Congress several letters, including the latest, pleading with Congressional members like yourself, to please continue the ACA subsidies.
For more than a year, NAIC has voiced its strong support for continuation of the enhanced premium tax credits for Marketplace coverage. The enhanced credits expire at the end of this year, but health insurance premiums for 2026 must be finalized much sooner. Health insurers have already filed their initial rates for 2026, and state regulators are poised to give them final approval in the coming weeks. We must complete this action soon in order to make plans available for the annual Open Enrollment Period that begins on November 1. Without an extension of the enhanced credits in September, insurers and marketplaces will begin to notify over 20 million consumers in all 50 states of major premium increases in
a matter of weeks.
Contrary to what Speaker of the House Johnson implies by continuing to cancel House sessions, there is an urgency to renew these subscriptions now, before it’s too late. As North Dakota’s—note, North Dakota…not a screaming leftist liberal state—insurance commissioner notes:
Democratic lawmakers say extending enhanced premium tax credits is urgent, with open enrollment weeks away. Republican lawmakers say there’s time to negotiate over a policy later, since the subsidies expire in December.
Who’s right?
“The window is rapidly closing,” says Jon Godfread, North Dakota’s insurance commissioner. He says the enhanced subsidies need to be extended before open enrollment starts Nov. 1. “Let’s do this now.”
If lawmakers miss that deadline, he says, “it’s going to be really, really challenging to go back [to consumers] and say, ‘OK, now we fixed it, please come back and shop at this market that you were priced out of.’ I just don’t believe consumers are going to do that.”
Again, this is about renewing the healthcare subsidies that impact on the people you represent: voters in the state of Georgia. It is not, as you stated in your newsletter, about healthcare for undocumented immigrants. This is a lie, and you know this is a lie. It’s not as egregious as the lie Ryan Zinke told, with his claim that Democrats are somehow trying to kill the $50 billion dollar rural healthcare fund recently passed, but it’s still a lie.
And the sad thing for you is, if you don’t do something now, if Johnson doesn’t stop shutting down the House and actually work with the Democrats, people will know November 1 that you all lied.