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Government Health Insurance Healthcare

Dear Buddy Carter: Health Care Premium subsidies help people

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.

Categories
Government

The best outcome for this shutdown tug of war: the end of the filibuster

Have you ever played tug of war? If so, you recognize what’s happening in Congress right now. Republicans pulling, Democrats pulling, and here we are: stuck in the middle, again.

Shutdowns for the government are never a good thing. Our country should have eliminated the possibility a long time ago. However, this particular shutdown is far worse than any others primarily because of how Trump has weaponized the shutdown. If he and his administration aren’t violating the Hatch Act on a daily basis, Trump and his Project 2025 minion, Vought, are using the shutdown as an excuse to decimate even more of the government.

We would think that Congressional members would be busily negotiating an end to the shutdown, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson won’t even convene the House for other business, much less working to resolve the shutdown. To me, this proves that Republicans are less interested in getting the government up and running, and more interested in pandering to our newest SCOTUS-appointed King, Trump.

Which leads me to what I think is the best possible outcome for this shutdown and that’s for Thune to finally blow up the filibuster and allow a party-line vote on resuming operations.

It would be nice to get healthcare for the citizens of this country, but Republicans have shown that little things like feeding the hungry and caring for the sick are not as important as building a ballroom for the President and striking a new coin in his image.

From both Johnson and Thune we’ve seen nothing but disinterest on ending the shutdown. However, at some point, critical functionality like paying for all those $50,000 bonuses for new ICE goons will shake them out of their Fox-headlight dazed stare and require them to actually Do Something.

They may realize that causing millions of taxpayer health insurance premiums to double in price could actually impact on their elections next year. It may actually also dawn on them that all the government cuts Trump is gleefully making are harming people that vote for them. And they may decide to toss Democrats a bone, and Democrats, knowing the hurts caused by the shutdown, may grab the bone. But I hope they don’t.

The best of all outcomes from this shutdown is to force Thune to blow away the 60-vote threshold to advance legislation.

While this seems like a win for Republicans, why do I consider this a win for Democrats? After all, this removes the last bit of power Democrats have in Congress.

The 60-vote threshold requires that at least eight Democrats cross over to help Republicans pass legislation. The Republicans then can claim at some future time—when their bad legislation hits Americans—that the bills passed with ‘bipartisan’ support. And the media will find someway, somehow, to twist the pretzel that now passes for ‘journalism’ and decide not only are Democrats partially to blame, they’re solely to blame.

After all: how many times have we read in the past that this or that is really the fault of Democrats, no matter who instigates the action and no matter how little Democrats have a say? Even now, when Democrats don’t control any part of the government, the White House and Congressional Republicans are saying the fault lies solely with the Democrats.

If the filibuster is gone, everything from this point on is solely and wholly owned by Republicans. And while there might be some positive legislation passed under complete Republican constrol, with this President and this Congress a lot of ugly will pass through the hallowed (or is that hollowed?) Congressional halls.

For once, Democrats won’t be around to clean up the mess Republicans make, and maybe this time, voters will actually wake up long enough to see it.

Best of all, we would no longer have to depend on Chuck “Everything’s fine” Schumer to eliminate the filibuster when the Democrats do finally get the Senate. And we’ll need to destroy the filibuster at that point if we have any hope of repairing even half the damage Trump, SCOTUS, and Congressional Republicans have done and will continue to do to this country in the next few years.

Sometimes the only way to ‘win’ at tug of war, is to just let go of the rope and let your opponent fall on their asses.

cover image, courtesy of Wannapik Studio

Categories
Government

Georgians: About that email you received from Social Security…

I’m retired, and as such, an important segment of my income comes from Social Security. If you’re a retired US citizen, chances are Social Security is important to you, too.

As a Social Security recipient, I occasionally get emails from the Social Security Administration (SSA) with important information, such as a new benefit letter is available for the coming year, or Social Security tax documents are ready.

I was surprised to receive an email from the Social Security Administration a couple of days ago with the following bold headline

Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors

Evidently, Trump’s administration had decided the best way to obscure the fact that tens of millions of people, including many seniors, are going to lose both healthcare and food assistance is to focus on one component of the bill they claim will be a savior for seniors.

I can assure you, my fellow Georgians: it’s not.

What was included in that monster bill just passed was a provision to provide an additional $6000.00 tax deduction to seniors that will apply only in the years 2025-2028.

Currently, we don’t pay taxes on Social Security if our incomes fall below $25,000 for an individual and $32,000 for a couple. Roughly 50 percent of Social Security recipients have income less than these upper limits and don’t pay income tax. In fact, many people don’t even have to file with the IRS annually because their income is too low.

Taxation on Social Security is relatively new (passed in legislation in 1984) and came about as a way to bolster dwindling Social Security and Medical trust funds. All of the money that comes from taxing Social Security income goes directly to these trust funds.

By increasing the standard deduction for seniors, Congressional Republicans have provided some additional income for middle and higher-income Social Security recipients, and will increase the numbers that don’t have to pay taxes. However, the amount seniors receive is relatively negligible.

According to the Tax Foundation, if all taxes for Social Security were eliminated, those in the 60-80% income percentiles would receive an additional 0.9 percent in income. With the increased deduction, these folks will  receive an additional 0.3 percent. The White House touts number of people who won’t have to pay any income tax, but most of these folks have to pay very little anyway. As the Tax Foundation notes:

Overall, the increased senior deduction with the phaseout would deliver a larger tax cut to lower-middle- and middle-income taxpayers compared to exempting all Social Security benefits from income taxation and would not weaken the trust funds as much. But given the temporary nature of the policy, it would increase the deficit-impact of the reconciliation bills without boosting long-run economic growth.

Both the additional amount seniors will receive and the temporary nature of the deduction combine to negate any lasting positive impact of the new deduction. However, there is a lasting negative impact on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

According to a report in Fox Business:

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimated that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s tax policy changes would result in those depletion dates moving up from early 2033 to late 2032 for Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund and from late 2033 to mid-2032 for Medicare’s Hospital Insurance trust fund.

The deduction for seniors is nothing but smoke and mirrors, but it’s smoke and mirrors that actually increases the vulnerability of seniors in the long run.

Tax Foundation: How Would the Proposed Additional Senior Deduction Compare to No Tax on Social Security?

Fox Business: Experts warn Senate tax bill accelerates Medicare and Social Security insolvency dates

Categories
Government Political

Dear Buddy – No Kings edition

Dear Buddy,

Long time, no see. Since I last touched base with you, democracy was kidnapped off the street, put in handcuffs, and hauled off by both National Guard and Marines. Lawyers are frantically working to ensure it doesn’t get shipped off to El Salvador, or some place with an active volcano.

The people rose up across the country and all 50 states—yes, even the Republican ones—in protest at democracy’s treatment. Why people even showed up in your district, which is kind of ironic, considering you never do.

Why all of the protests?

You see, we’re used to the National Guard showing up when our homes flood or get burned down to the ground, and we’re vulnerable and scared, and they look like saviors sent from on high to help us try to return to normalcy. They find us in the debris and they rescue us from rivers and bring us food and water and comfort.

We’re not used to seeing National Guard surround a bevy of masked government agents in street clothes, themselves surrounding a single frightened man, or young child screaming in terror.

Of course, the National Guard troops aren’t used to it, either. They’re used to being welcomed with open arms—and pizza—not cold stares and terrified tears. I have a suspicion they don’t like it and may rethink their membership in the Guard because of it.

As for the Marines, well…the photo of a US citizen being detained by Marines looks familiar. Didn’t I see the same thing in photos in Pravda? I’m sure it must have been some Russian newspaper or another, because I know I’ve certainly never seen anything like that here, in the United States.

Active duty soldiers being turned loose on the people in this country. The idea is so outlandish, I’m sure it will become the plot of some book or movie. Probably one that doesn’t have a happy ending.

Before I continue with improbable movie plots,  I did hear you’re running to be Senator of our state. I find this a little odd, though. I mean, if you find it so hard to meet with people in your smaller  Congressional district, how are you going to meet with the people of the entire state? And I don’t think showing up at luncheons for Republican women really counts, do you?

But I digress…this isn’t about your political chances, or thoughts of hell freezing over. This is about democracy. The small ‘d’ kind. The kind that once upon a time, it seemed both parties supported. Oh, the parties had differences of opinions on exactly what the support entailed, but I’m pretty sure that activating 4000 National Guard and 700 Marines because of a couple of hundred protestors was not on anyone’s Bingo card.

What happened to you, Buddy, so that you’d turn a blind eye to all of this? Are you so lost in reaching for political power that you forgot that with great power comes great responsibility?

Oh darn, now I know that last line was from some book or movie, but I don’t care, because it’s true: power must be tempered by responsibility.

The power of a leader is not in how much money they get, or how many tanks they can roll down the street; it’s not measured in numbers of federal employees fired, or scared hardworking immigrants sent to torture chamber in another country; it’s certainly not measured in how many American people can be cowered or suppressed. The power of a leader is how much of a force for good they are for the people as a whole. Not just some people, not just rich people, not just people of one race and religion, and not just people who belong to a certain party.

To all of us.

Buddy, I want you to listen carefully to what I say, because it’s more important than introducing bills to create a committee of 13 people whose sole purpose is to investigate the mental health of a man who is no longer President.

The true power of a leader is directly proportional to the people’s own power over that leader. A truly great leader is a servant, not a king.

 

Categories
Government People

Dear Buddy Carter: Do you believe in the rule of law?

Buddy, I have a question for you:

Do you believe in the rule of law?

I ask this question because we elected you to Congress to be our representative among Congressional lawmakers. That’s what Congress is, you know: lawmakers.

Yet in the few months since Trump has been in office, he and his cohort have been breaking existing laws to a degree never before seen in our country.

He has grabbed people off the street and sent them to a prison known for its enslavement and torture. He has cancelled grants to universities solely because they won’t let him control every last aspect of their operation. He has terminated student visas because they have written opinion pieces in newspapers he doesn’t like.

Trump has turned the Department of Justice into a revenge machine, telling it to open investigations on people who have done nothing more than deny his lie that he won the election in 2020.

He has sent people into agencies and they have openly broken security laws, including grabbing data they have no need for or legal reason to have. And when someone has exposed this behavior to you, in Congress, his life was threatened.

If a law firm has defended someone Trump doesn’t like, he has threatened them with dire consequences if they don’t adhere to his demands, all of which blatantly violate the Constitution.

He has gone after universities and threatened them—threatened them!— if the universities don’t give up their freedom of speech, and their own ability to govern themselves. And when Harvard bravely said no, all grants to the university were pulled—even though these grants were for research that help us live better and longer.

Trump has frozen funds that the country has guaranteed, both to agencies overseas and to our own domestic organizations and states. Funds that are necessary for medical care and medical research; to monitor storms and recover from them; to help communities better prepare for storms and other catastrophes; to help schools better serve their students and ensure all of the students are fed and educated equally; to support small businesses and farmers; to help the hungry, the sick, and those harmed by circumstances beyond their control.

Funds that you, in Congress, allocated and control. Supposedly control.

He openly and laughingly mocks our judicial system, and I include the Supreme Court in this, though this higher court’s timid responses to Trump’s outrageous acts have not shown it in at its best. But even when they finally pushed back, ever so slightly, he laughed at it. Not only laughed at it, he was joined by one of South America’s most brutal dictators in that laughter. His new best friend.

Now, he threatens to not only send migrants to a brutal life in another country, he threatens to send citizens, too. And we already know he’ll do so without giving anyone the benefit of legal representation in a court of law.

He’ll just send armed thugs into the street, dressed in plain clothes and wearing hoods and driving in black SUVs to grab people off the street and put them on a plane and then hold up his hands and go, “Oopsie! Made a mistake! Well, can’t do anything about it now, they’re in foreign control!”

We were warned that we were approaching a Constitutional crises, when the President of the United States held himself above the laws of the land. We waited in hope, and some fear, to see what he would do when courts intervened.

We now know what he’ll do: disobey the courts. We are no longer approaching a Constitutional crises, we’re in one, and we now wonder if, at the end of four years, will we even have a country left? Will we even be allowed to vote for who we want? Or will we receive notes pasted on our doors, threatening us if we don’t do as Trump asks?

And in all of this—all of it!—not one peep from you. Not one mild expression of concern. Not even a single, “well, we might want to reconsider this.” No, all you have done is appear on radically right newscasts as a way of pretending you don’t need a Town Hall, and then spent the time praising Trump.

So I ask you now, do you believe in the rule of law? You are our elected representative to Congress, to the body of lawmakers that have kept our country free, safe, and secure for 250 years. And as a lawmaker, isn’t it your sworn duty to ensure that laws are kept and not broken? Or is your allegiance to Trump so strong that you don’t care about the laws, or the harm that will come to the people in your district because these laws are broken? All that matters to you is Trump?

It’s a simple question, Buddy: Do you believe in the rule of law?

Sources

Who is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man ICE mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison?

Trump officials cut billions in Harvard funds after university defies demands

How the Education Department cuts could hurt low-income and rural schools

Trump directs DOJ to investigate former administration officials who criticized him

USDA cancels $1 billion in funding for schools and food banks to buy food from local suppliers

FEMA cuts $30 million grant earmarked to improve flooding, drainage issues in Savannah

Public libraries in Georgia brace for federal cuts

Academic medical centers say funding cuts jeopardize health research

A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

Video shows Tufts graduate student grabbed off the street by federal immigration officials

Core Democratic groups are preparing to be targeted by the Trump administration

The Trump administration’s defiance is proving Justice Sotomayor’s point

Lawrence on Trump attacking the rule of law: We are all Harvard. We are all Abrego Garcia.

Buddy Carter is Georgia’s First Congressional District Representative