Business
Commentary: Republicans don’t have a healthcare plan, just a plan to kill Obamacare
For millions of Americans, Jan. 1 won’t be an occasion to celebrate the coming of the new year. It will be an occasion for dread.
The reason is the impending termination of crucial premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans. Without a last-minute agreement between congressional Democrats and Republicans, the subsidy structure that has been in place since 2021 will revert to the original arrangement written into the act in 2010.
Millions of Americans dependent on the ACA will face potentially ruinous increases in coverage costs. Many will have to drop their coverage. That process will leave those with the most urgent and costly treatments in the ACA, and those who think they can get away with dropping insurance — or simply can’t afford it — on the outs. The result will be a sicker coverage cohort, which will raise prices for everybody.
I want to see the billions of dollars go to the people, not to the insurance companies and I want to see the people to go out and buy themselves great healthcare.
— An empty promise from President Trump
The current stalemate is the offspring of the GOP’s 15-year campaign to undermine — really, to kill — Obamacare.
Republicans have dressed up their attack on the ACA with reams of empty rhetoric. They habitually call the ACA a “disaster,” without offering a cogent explanation of why.
Plainly, they see Obamacare as a nice, juicy partisan target, but they’re not reading the room. The ACA’s popularity has steadily increased since mid-2016; in KFF’s most recent tracking poll, taken in September, favorable opinion swamped unfavorable opinion 64% to 35%.
Americans have voted for the ACA with their feet. Since 2018, enrollment in Obamacare plans has more than doubled, from 11.4 million to 24.3 million this year, with a notable enrollment increase starting in 2021, when the premium subsidy structure was improved. That’s the change due to expire on Dec. 31 (Republicans, please note). The enrollment figure doesn’t include the 16.7 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid under ACA expansion rules — a provision still rejected by benighted political leaders in 10 red states.
They blame the ACA for higher healthcare costs. A few things about this: Yes, healthcare costs have continued to rise since its enactment. But they’ve risen at a much slower rate than before. Out-of-pocket per capita healthcare spending rose at a rate of 3.4% a year from 2000 to 2018, often exceeding the general inflation rate, but by only 1.9% a year since then.
That increase isn’t driven by the ACA. It’s the result of several factors, including the general aging of the U.S. population and a sharp increase in pharmaceutical costs, due in part to the advent of high-priced specialty prescription drugs.
The GOP has amended its attack on the ACA in recent months, as the clamor to extend the premium subsidies has intensified. Republicans are now decrying the ACA as a haven for fraud — “a broken system fueled by fraud,” says House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). Johnson drew his conclusion from a report by the Government Accountability Office published earlier this month.
Johnson may have been hoping that no one would actually go and read that report. I did so, only to find that it doesn’t say what he claims it did. The GAO tested ACA enrollment controls on the federal marketplace — did enrollees accurately estimate their income and submit accurate Social Security numbers? Its test involved submitting applications from 20 fictitious individuals, of whom 18 were approved.
Is this an adequate sample? The GAO itself says it isn’t. The results, it says, “cannot be generalized to the overall enrollment population.” In some test cases, the applications included false Social Security numbers, which are used to verify income claims. But the GAO says that in the real world, absence of verified Social Security numbers “does not necessarily represent overpayments.”
Are these findings cause for concern? Sure, even though the GAO provided no findings about how widespread these flaws may be. In any case, there’s no evidence here that “the ACA marketplace is a magnet for fraud,” as Johnson called it, suggesting that thousands or millions of applicants are lined up for some healthcare gravy train. And it’s certainly no reason to kill the subsidies.
The other linchpin of the GOP attack on the Affordable Care Act is heavy breathing over how the ACA premium subsidies are paid directly to insurance carriers, rather than as cash to households. This idea trickles down from President Trump but has been embraced by Republicans in Congress. So it deserves a very close look.
Here’s Trump last week: “I want to see the billions of dollars go to the people, not to the insurance companies and I want to see the people to go out and buy themselves great healthcare. Much better healthcare at very little cost.” This has been an enduring promise from Trump, who never bothers to explain how the nirvana of great healthcare at little cost can be achieved.
Here’s Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician who cast the final vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary, a vote that has left him humiliated over and over by Kennedy: “Republicans absolutely want to help the American people with the affordability of their out-of-pocket [spending]. We want to put money in their pocket to pay the out-of-pocket.”
Before delving deeper into this issue, a few words about the existing ACA premium subsidies.
The original ACA subsidies capped premiums on a sliding scale ranging from 2.07% of income for those earning 138% of the federal poverty line to 9.83% of income for those at 400% of the poverty line. This year, 138% of the poverty level for a family of four is $44,367, and 400% is $128,600.
The ACA’s architects knew these subsidies were inadequate. Especially troubling was the sharp cutoff of any subsidies for families earning even a dime more than 400% of the poverty level. This became known as the “subsidy cliff.” But it was an artifact of political compromise; the expectation was that Congress would get around to fixing the cheeseparing subsidy schedule at a later date.
In the pandemic-driven American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, Congress refashioned the subsidies so families with incomes up to 150% of the poverty level ($56,475 for a family of four this year) could find decent Obamacare plans for free. For those above that level and up to 400%, the subsidies were significantly increased. That’s the change set to expire Dec. 31.
It’s true that eligibility for these subsidies is technically unlimited, but the conservative trope that they benefit “millionaires” is nonsense. As I reported earlier this year, the new structure means technically that someone earning $1 million a year would have to pay no more than $85,000 per person for an ACA plan.
Is this a handout? ACA expert Charles Gaba tested the claim by hunting for a benchmark Silver ACA plan, on which the subsidies are based, costing that much anywhere in the U.S. The highest-cost plans he found anywhere are in four counties of West Virginia, where a Silver plan for a 64-year-old couple tops out at $63,100 a year — in a state with the highest ACA premiums in the nation.
Cassidy’s proposal is essentially to replace the existing subsidy enhancements with health savings accounts, which must be paired with high-deductible health plans, and to seed them with $1,000 a year per adult ages 18 to 49 and $1,500 for those 50 and up. Households with income up to 700% of the federal poverty level would be eligible — that’s about $225,000 for a family of four.
Let’s start with the plain arithmetic of this proposal. The accounts must be paired with a bronze-level ACA plan. Those plans cover only about 60% of average healthcare costs. Deductibles are high — at Covered California, the state’s ACA marketplace, the bronze plan deductible is $5,800 per person and $11,600 for a family. Out-of-pocket maximums are also high — $10,600 per individual and $21,200 for a family.
So right from the outset, the Cassidy proposal would leave families facing serious medical expenses out in the cold.
The HSA idea is part of a GOP argument that giving families cash to spend on healthcare gives them “skin in the game” — that by forking over dollars, they’ll be more sensitive to the cost of medical care and therefore seek out or negotiate lower prices.
Two of the argument’s leading academic promoters, Liran Einav of Stanford and Amy Finkelstein of MIT, wrote in a 2023 book lauding deductibles and co-pays that “patients must pay something for their care, otherwise they’ll rush to the doctor every time they sneeze.” More recently, as the facts have come in, they’ve said: “We take it back.”
The truth is that there’s no evidence that higher financial obstacles to healthcare produce better outcomes. They do discourage unnecessary treatments, as a seminal Rand Corp. study found in 1981. But they also discourage necessary treatments.
The idea that deductibles and co-pays will prompt the average person to seek out low-cost providers is a fantasy. People typically seek out medical care in an atmosphere of urgency. They don’t take the time to compare prices as if they’re buying a car; they go to the doctor and follow his or her instructions, including prescribed procedures and diagnostic tests. (Sometimes they do price shop, but generally for treatments that can be deferred and are medically routine and elective — one study showing cost savings from price shopping focused on hip and knee replacements, for instance).
As for the claims of Trump and other Republicans that Americans, armed with cash in their pocket, can use it to negotiate medical care — who has the time, energy or bargaining skill to do that?
In any case, the HSA is mischaracterized as a healthcare provision. It’s not; it’s a tax break in disguise, useful for higher-income taxpayers who can afford to cover the high deductibles themselves while pocketing a tax deduction. It’s especially appealing for those who are in good health and expect to stay so — they proceed on the assumption that they probably won’t have a serious (and expensive) medical issue.
U.S. healthcare costs per capita have continued to rise since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, but at a much lower rate than before.
(JAMA)
The bottom line is that the Republican Party is out of healthcare ideas. They’ve had 15 years to conjure up a better program than the Affordable Care Act, and have nothing to show us except proposals that won’t work for the average family. They’re up against a wall of their own making, and are pretending that they have something better. They don’t, and you and I will be paying the price of their failure.
Residents in the city of Monterey Park will be the first in the nation to vote on a permanent ban on data centers Tuesday.
If approved, Measure NDC would prohibit data centers within the city limits and could only be overturned by another vote.
Yard signs saying “No Data Center” in English and Chinese with images of dragons line sidewalks in the San Gabriel Valley city.
As a wave of data center opposition sweeps the country, numerous towns and counties across the U.S. have instituted temporary moratoria and other restrictions on the facilities. But only a handful have instituted indefinite bans, and just four other towns have sent related matters to the ballot.
Supporters are hoping the vote will set a precedent for the rest of the region, where residents are fighting proposals in Vernon and City of Industry.
“This is about as permanent a ban as we can get,” said Steven Kung, co-founder of the group No Data Center Monterey Park. “Winning Measure NDC would send a huge message to the rest of the San Gabriel Valley about how residents don’t want data centers.”
The ballot measure emerged from the fight against a 247,000-square-foot center proposed in 2024 by the Australian-owned investment firm HMC StratCap for a residential area in Monterey Park.
The facility would have sat less than 500 feet away from the nearest home and used three times the electricity of the 60,000-person, predominantly Asian American city.
While the developer touted the potential for jobs and tax revenue, residents expressed concerns about noise and air pollution, rising electricity rates and a potential to lower property values.
The company pulled its plans in late March following public outcry and a March 4 city council vote to extend a temporary data center moratorium and place a ban on Tuesday’s ballot.
In a letter to the city council, HMC StratCap said it would pursue a different use for the land and would not engage in a ballot measure fight.
The city council later banned data centers indefinitely, the first in California to do so, said Mayor Elizabeth Yang. But she’s still been out campaigning for the measure with all four other council members.
“If a council puts in an ordinance, a future council can reverse it too,” said Yang. “With the ballot measure, unbanning it is a lot harder because you need the entire city to vote on it.”
The measure proposes the ban “to protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health” and “prevent impacts to electricity and water rates.”
While California places third in the country for existing data centers with about 300 facilities, it hasn’t been a hot spot in the recent AI-driven data center boom. High electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois or Arizona.
“Most of California’s data centers are small by today’s standards,” said Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at UC Riverside who studies how to reduce the environmental impacts of data centers. “Ten years ago, they would be medium-sized, but the power demand for new AI data centers has increased a lot.”
The average operating data center demands 45 megawatts, according to the Washington Post, while the average planned one would draw 430 MW. The one proposed for Monterey Park would have required about 50 MW at peak demand.
As proposals crop up in SoCal, they’re met with fierce opposition. Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoria, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update. City of Industry, Vernon, City of Commerce and Santa Fe Springs are moving in the other direction, trying to court developers and streamline data center approvals. Community groups are fighting that.
Outside the San Gabriel Valley, residents of Coachella and Imperial County are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
Matthew Shaw, a volunteer with the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, who recently published a report on opposition to AI data centers, said a vote to ban them in Monterey Park “would lead to copycats, partially because so many groups are just opposed to any data center development at all.”
While there is no formal opposition to Measure NDC, some building trades like Ironworker Local 433 supported the Monterey Park data center when it was still live before city council. Those in the data center industry are lamenting the state of public opinion.
“These are multi-billion-dollar assets that are built by multi-trillion-dollar companies. These things will get done,” said Mehdi Paryavi, chairman of the International Data Center Authority. “My biggest problem is that our industry does not invest enough in community engagement.”
Paryavi said towns that seek to limit data centers are missing out on thousands of jobs generated by data center construction, operations and customers, as well as faster artificial intelligence speeds and better performance.
Kung said local community organizers are “looking at the empirical evidence” and seeing a ban as a win.
“We’ve never seen a city that embraces a data center and is like, ‘Look how our quality of life has increased, look how all the revenue has gone into citywide improvements,’” he said. “That just doesn’t exist.”
Business
Company wants to revive Primm, the gambling spot turned ghost town. Owners say: Not so fast
A once-popular gambling mecca at the California-Nevada border that faded into obscurity could get a second life.
A Las Vegas-based truck-stop company is reportedly hoping to revive Primm to its former glory. But the would-be comeback faces a hurdle: striking a deal with the landowners, the Primm family.
In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, LV Petroleum Chief Executive Kris Roach shared his plans for the state-line ghost town.
“We would like to operate everything at the exit, the hotels, the casinos, the truck stop, the stores, pretty much from farm to table,” Roach told the Review-Journal. “We would like to revive the whole exit.”
But Cory Clemetson, president of Primm and grandson of founder Ernie Primm, said in a statement shared with The Times: “Recent reports suggesting that an agreement with any specific potential partner may be imminent are overstated and premature.”
LV Petroleum is an active operator of convenience stores and travel centers with more than 80 locations across the United States, according to its LinkedIn page.
In May, Affinity Gaming, which currently operates several businesses on behalf of the Primm family, announced a plan to close most properties it had been leasing by July 4.
Whiskey Pete’s, which along with its companion resorts at Primm drew in visitors with low prices and deals, closed in 2024. Buffalo Bill’s, which featured a 209-foot-tall roller coaster, concluded its operations in 2025.
Primm Valley Resorts, the sole operating casino in Primm, remains open until the July deadline. Other stores affected by the closure include the Primm Center, the Flying J, and the Primm Lotto Store, according to KSNV NBC Las Vegas.
Primm, an alternative to Vegas for Southern Californians that cut 45 minutes off the drive, suffered a decline in tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic and saw increased competition from tribal casinos in California.
Roach told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he did not want to see the businesses go dark, adding that 344 employees would lose their jobs following the closure. Roach said, among his plans, would be reopening Whiskey Pete’s.
But the Primm family says a deal is far from done.
“Our family is currently considering opportunities involving multiple well-established operators that have successfully operated similar hotel-casino properties in Nevada,” Clemetson said. “We will continue to explore all viable options as we work toward the best possible solution especially for the hundreds of Primm employees and their families dealing with this difficult situation.”
Modern-day Primm began in the 1950s when Ernie Primm established a motel and coffee shop at the state-border location. In the 1970s, he and son Gary expanded operations to build Whiskey Pete’s. Once called State Line, the area was renamed Primm in 1996 after Ernie’s death.
Anthropic, the company behind the powerful artificial intelligence chatbot Claude, has filed to get ready to list its shares.
The development comes days after it raised $65 billion, valuing it at $965 billion.
The company, founded in 2021 by a breakaway faction from OpenAI, was viewed as an upstart that tailored its chatbots to the needs of businesses and developers, rather than consumers.
Late last year, the release of its agentic coding assistant propelled it ahead in the AI race, as the company’s annualized revenue skyrocketed from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion in May.
“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” the company said in a statement, announcing the confidential filing on its website.
The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set, the company said. Last week, Anthropic released its latest model, Claude Opus 4.8, to the public.
The upstart began gaining ground against its larger rival OpenAI late last year with the release of its Claude Opus 4.5, which became a huge hit among developers and enthusiasts who were able to merely describe an app or website or online dashboard or research problem in English, and have the coding agent complete the task. .
As adoption of Claude grew, OpenAI has been juggling numerous big bets, including the shuttered text-to-video model Sora, agentic shopping and an AI-native browser, with mounting challenges to monetize its base of 800 million users. The company has since streamlined its operations, focusing on its coding product, Codex, and continues to invest in image generation and robotics.
The announcement puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which reportedly hired bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in the race to go public. Anthropic now eclipses its rival, which was valued at $852 billion in March.
Elon Musk’s xAI, which operates the chatbot Grok, is a part of SpaceX that is gearing up to go public next week. It will be the largest initial public offering of stock in history, and a successful listing will make Musk the first trillionaire.
The blockbuster year for Silicon Valley IPOs will test people’s appetite to invest in the promise of artificial intelligence, amid worries and warnings of an AI bubble. .
Nasdaq introduced a rule change this year, shortening the three-month waiting period for stocks to be included in the index to 15 days.
It was done to accommodate monster listings such as SpaceX. The cooling-off period allows newly listed stocks to stabilize before passive index funds pick them up, but indices said it’s a much-needed update, as companies stay private longer, are more mature and have much larger valuations than in the past.
Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, has been outspoken about the risks of artificial intelligence wiping out half of all entry-level jobs and driving unemployment up by 20%. Some in the Trump administration have criticized his views as alarmist and accused his advocacy of AI safety of being an attempt at regulatory capture to create onerous compliance barriers that would restrict AI development to a handful of large companies, locking out smaller competitors.
In March, the company sued the Pentagon after it was designated as a “supply chain risk” for refusing to allow the use of its AI model for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
The White House softened its posture against Anthropic in May, after the release of its AI model Claude Mythos, which proved itself adept at finding critical software bugs. The incident prompted a U-turn in the Trump administration’s laissez-faire approach to AI regulation and led to the consideration of safety testing before broader public release.
Anthropic’s Mythos model has now become a tool of geopolitical advantage for the U.S., as governments across the globe, including the European Union, have requested access to the powerful tool to identify and patch vulnerabilities in the banking and financial system that could be exposed to hacking.
The explosive demand has increased Anthropic’s need for AI chips, causing previous outages and forcing the company to set usage limits for users. To secure access to vital hardware, the company signed agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX in April for new computing capacity.
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