Mike Rounds Lays Out How Democrats Created Obamacare Premium Hikes

Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota told CNN host Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday that Obamacare is riddled with “fraud” while discussing the government shutdown.

The federal government entered a partial shutdown at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time on Oct. 1 after the Senate failed to pass a continuing resolution, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster after the House of Representatives passed the short-term funding bill on Sept. 19. Rounds said that Democrats, whose demands for the short-term measure include over $1 trillion in funding for various priorities, including continuing enhanced payouts for Obamacare, created the situation.

“We’ve been talking privately for a long time about it. But number one, even if these subsidies that came in, the Covid subsidies, as we call them, or the subsidies that President Biden authorized, even if those were put back in the way they are, with all of the corruption and all the fraud that was still included in it, and Democrats admit that there was fraud that needs to be fixed in it, but even if we left it all alone and just redid it, you could probably change the premiums that are going to go up by maybe 5%,” Rounds told Collins on “The Source.”

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In June, the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services announced charges involving over $14 billion in health care fraud.

“It’s going to go up between 16 and 30% this next year, regardless of what Congress does. And part of it is because Obamacare has never worked correctly. It’s always needed subsidies. And that’s the reason why… they put it in in the first place, there were subsidies included in it. And secondly, they put additional subsidies in at the time that the Covid crisis hit,” Rounds said.

“And now it’s Democrats that set the time in which it would expire,” Rounds continued. “They set it up for December of ‘25 for those credits to expire. And now they’re telling us and they’re suggesting to the American people that it’s our fault that their subsidies are expiring right now? They could have put it in permanently if they would have wanted to when they did reconciliation. They decided not to do that.”

A study released by the Paragon Health Institute reported that the subsidies only cover a little more than 3% of projected 2026 premiums for health insurance. Rounds said that Republicans were willing to address the reasons health care costs are exploding under Obamacare but said it couldn’t happen while the shutdown was taking place.

“I thought originally, when we had some time, we could find a way to make some modifications to the existing subsidies that are in place,” Rounds told Collins. “Number one, the fraud has got to go away and Democrats tell us that they agree with us on that. We know that there’s literally billions of dollars in fraud. We’ve already got the criminal cases going on.”

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