For years, Democrats have wielded the tired accusation that Republicans lack a healthcare alternative to the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare. 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) (L) and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) / Heather Diehl/Getty Images

On Friday, House Republicans called that bluff, unveiling the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act, a legislative package aimed at dismantling the cost drivers embedded in the Affordable Care Act while expanding choice and transparency. The bill heads to the House floor next week, and predictably, Democrats are already scrambling to kill it.

“Nearly 15 years ago, the Democrats’ Unaffordable Care Act broke the American health care system. Since its inception, premium costs have skyrocketed, networks have shrunk, and the system has become bloated, inefficient, and riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse. While Democrats demand that taxpayers write bigger checks to insurance companies to hide the cost of their failed law, House Republicans are tackling the real drivers of health care costs to provide affordable care, increase access and choice, and restore integrity to our nation’s health care system for all Americans,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement. 

“Earlier this year, Democrats had a chance to help make life more affordable by supporting the Working Families Tax Cuts legislation,” Johnson continued. “Instead, they voted to raise taxes, protect waste and fraud, and continue providing free health care to illegal immigrants. Democrats’ ‘affordability’ charade has gone on long enough.”

Johnson said the new Republican proposal offers a responsible path forward on health care, cutting premium costs while expanding access to quality health care options for Americans nationwide. “The Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act will actually deliver affordable health care – and we look forward to advancing it through the House.”

A key aspect of the legislation is a push for transparency for pharmacy benefit managers. PBMs, the middlemen who negotiate drug prices and rebates, have long operated without any transparency at all at the expense of employers and patients. The proposed legislation would force PBMs to disclose detailed data on prescription drug spending, rebates, spread pricing, and formulary decisions. Employers and workers would finally see what they’re paying for – and what they’re not getting in return.

According to Johnson, the bill also appropriates funding for cost-sharing reduction payments beginning in 2027. These payments, meant to lower premiums and stabilize the individual market, would be directed toward low-income enrollees. The measure aims to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly rather than being dumped into a system that rewards insurers for inflated costs, as the current system does.

Beyond transparency, the legislation expands health coverage options for American workers through Association Health Plans. These plans allow employers, including the self-employed, to pool resources across industries to purchase high-quality, more affordable coverage. 

Republicans have long advocated for the idea that by banding together, small businesses and independent workers gain the negotiating power currently monopolized by large corporations and government-run exchanges.

The bill also clarifies that stop-loss insurance – coverage that protects employers from catastrophic claims—is not “health insurance coverage” under federal law. This distinction allows small and mid-sized businesses to tailor their employee benefits without triggering the burdensome regulations of Obamacare. 

Another provision codifies and strengthens the 2019 rules that allow employers to offer defined contributions for employees to purchase their own coverage. These arrangements, rebranded as CHOICE arrangements, let employees pay premiums on a pre-tax basis while selecting plans that fit their needs rather than accepting whatever their employer chooses. 

The concept is simple: give workers control over their healthcare dollars and let them shop for the coverage that works best for them.

Naturally, Democrats hate it.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wasted no time trashing the proposal, dismissing it as “likely to be a disaster” before he even knew what was in it. Speaking to MS NOW on Friday, Jeffries claimed the package would diminish rather than enhance American healthcare, though he offered no specifics to support his assertion. His vague prophecy of doom reflects the Democrats’ broader strategy: attack anything that threatens Obamacare’s legacy, regardless of the facts.

Jeffries suggests that a vote on the GOP health care bill + amendment vote on Fitzpatrick bill won’t be suitable for Democrats.

“Their health care package, as I understand it, is likely to be a disaster and actually not enhance the health care of the American people. It will… pic.twitter.com/Sr6JbZE9zT

— Mychael Schnell (@mychaelschnell) December 12, 2025

But that doesn’t change the fact that the Affordable Care Act has been a disaster. A recent Forbes analysis found that since it was passed in 2010, premiums have nearly tripled and deductibles have more than doubled. The cost of coverage for a family of four has surged by more than $10,000. Worse, the coverage itself has deteriorated. Americans are paying more for less, a reality that Democrats refuse to acknowledge.

The Forbes analysis also shows that Obamacare deductibles run far higher than those in employer-sponsored plans. The law was marketed to the public as a way to create affordable, accessible care. Instead, it became a case study in government overreach that enriched insurers and bureaucrats while sticking middle-class families with soaring costs. That was entirely by design.

Republicans are betting that Americans have had enough. The Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act offers a clear alternative: transparency over opacity, choice over mandates, and market competition over government control. Whether it passes remains to be seen, but the message is unmistakable. Democrats built Obamacare. Republicans are offering a way out. 
 

Via Financial Preparedness,

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” 

~ Benjamin Franklin

I think virtually everyone would agree that there are “bad guys” in this world. Of course, there are varying degrees of “bad,” but we should concern ourselves with the most dangerous—the ones who have both the desire and the ability to take one simple action that would probably end up destroying Western civilization.

Due to the unprecedented amount of fake news, gaslighting, lies, propaganda, mis- and disinformation and psychological warfare operations that are employed today, this can be quite challenging for the average person to ascertain. But due to the existential stakes involved, having this ability is crucial for survival.

Recently, Elon Musk devised a litmus test that one can use to determine who the bad guys are:

“As a general rule, you can tell which side is the good side and which side is the bad side by which side wishes to restrict freedom of speech. The side that is restricting freedom of speech . . . you know, that would have been the Hitler, Stalin, Mussolinis of the world, they had very strong censorship, very strong restrictions on speech. That’s one of the signs that they are the bad guys.”

Recently the European Commission (the elite, unelected body of the EU that actually runs it) levied a €140 million fine on X and Elon Musk personally for allegedly breaking its “laws” requiring social media transparency. As Michael Shellenberger pointed out, “the goal of the European Commission, like that of the governments of Britain, Brazil, and Australia, is to censor the American people.” As I wrote about in March, the EU is maniacally determined to wage a campaign of cultural suicide. But for them it’s not enough for just Europe to be overrun by barbarians. No, they want all of Western civilization to fall.

As an aside, Shellenberger noted that “The EU is now in direct violation of the NATO Treaty, under which the US is militarily obligated to defend Europe. The NATO Treaty requires member states to have free speech and free and fair elections. France and Germany are actively and illegally preventing political candidates from running for office for ideological reasons, namely their opposition to mass migration. And the Romanian high court, with the support of the European Commission, nullified election results under the thin and unproven pretext of Russian interference, after a nationalist and populist presidential candidate won.”

J.D. Vance recently said, “Germany’s entire defense is subsidized by the American taxpayer. There are thousands upon thousands of American troops in Germany today. Do you think that the American taxpayer is going to stand for that if you get thrown in jail in Germany for posting a mean tweet? Of course they’re not….[the friendship between the U.S. and Europe] is based on shared values. You do not have shared values if you’re jailing people for saying we should close down our border. You don’t have shared values if you cancel elections because you don’t like the result—and that happened in Romania. You do not have shared values if you’re so afraid of your own people that you silence them and shut them up.”

Well, the European Commission (and NATO) is about to FAFO, as they say. My German friend points out that Europe has more people than Russia (implying that Russia couldn’t conquer Europe), but as I replied, that’s not what we in the US Army called the “order of battle.” It doesn’t matter how many people you have if they don’t value liberty enough to be willing to risk their lives to defend it.

I’ll soon finish reading a great book called While Europe Slept, in which the author writes, “…Americans, for all their idiocies and vulgarities, really do believe in fighting for liberty, even the liberty of strangers in faraway places with names they can’t spell and languages they can’t speak a word of and cultures they find ridiculous. In their view, to defend other people’s freedom is to defend their own….maybe that’s what being an American does come down to—a sentimentalism, about liberty among other things, that many Western Europeans just can’t fathom….Sitting there with [his Dutch friends], I realized that they were genuinely unable to comprehend a land whose people take liberty seriously enough to die for it.”

I recently heard about how “vandals” (a euphemism for immigrants) attacked the Christmas market and living nativity scene in Erbach, Germany, beating and torturing two donkeys and defecating in the church. This was relatively mild; at least no one was injured or killed, as is often the case.

Erbach is very close to where I lived at my first duty station in the early 1990s, and I’m sure I drove through it while exploring the area. At the time, Germany was a clean, orderly and picturesque place; even the forests seemed like they were diligently maintained. Living there was a wonderful experience, and I have many good memories of it. Unfortunately—and I say this as someone who spent 3.5 of the best years of my life enduring many hardships and risking my life to defend it—Germany (along with France, the UK, Ireland, Sweden and probably most of the rest of western Europe) is finished. It’s kaput, it’s over, finito Benito, dead Fred.

Ideally, we would be able to rescue hundreds of millions of innocent Europeans from a tyrannical fate. However, given the current dire situation, I think Europe has passed the event horizon of a very dark black hole. When you have some quiet time, watch this sobering interview with a professor of military history living in the UK. He says there is no political solution to the problem, and cannot foresee an outcome that does not result in massive deaths (he estimates it will be between 23,000 and 500,000 in the UK alone). He predicts violence will begin suddenly and spread quickly to neighboring countries.

It’s now time to dispel illusions and come to grips with reality. The U.S. should cut its losses and allow most of Europe to collapse into a supernova of disarmament, severe censorship, never-ending war, mass taxpayer-funded immigration, medieval religious fanaticism, rampant crime and terrorism, cuckoldry and organized rape of underage girls on an industrial scale, humiliation and intimidation, environmental alarmism, welfare socialism, stifling bureaucracy, corruption, deindustrialization and de-agriculturalization, central bank digital currency, loss of privacy, massive government spending/deficits/debt, currency/financial/ economic/sovereign debt crises and cultural and societal extinction.

Congressman Thomas Massie just introduced a bill to withdraw the U.S. from NATO. To help soften the blow, perhaps the U.S. could offer a generous asylum policy (with no welfare benefits) for Europeans who wanted to escape this raging dumpster fire and live in a normal, civilized country, as it did with the Boer farmers in South Africa, who were being systematically slaughtered. Perhaps the number of refugees allowed each month would decline over time to help ensure that only the most ideologically compatible people were admitted instead of hordes of disillusioned Leftists who eventually realized that statism doesn’t work. This would also shore up America’s own flagging demographics, allowing it to stave off the barbarians for a while longer.

Although Trump won a decisive Electoral College victory in 2024 and Republicans control Congress (though by a thin margin), Democrats are emboldened by recent election victories, and The Great Reset is rapidly being implemented in most of the rest of the world. Few people realize that Western civilization actually hangs in the balance by the thinnest of threads, one that currently runs straight through X and Elon Musk. If the European Commission succeeds in censoring X and other American websites, Western civilization is over.

Without free speech and the right to share ideas and find out what’s really going on, it becomes impossible to stop tyranny. In modern warfare, opponents first seek to decapitate each other by eliminating the leadership (assassination in the political world) and their ability to see and communicate (censorship). Once you’ve done that, it’s much easier to disarm (gun control) and destroy (or subjugate) an enemy. The European Commission doesn’t want to restrict speech because they care about democracy or the truth, they want to censor people because they intend to enslave them.

The current battle between the European Commission and X reminds me of the Battle of Britain after the start of World War II: One small country (or website) standing alone against an onslaught by a regional empire that appeared unstoppable. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Germany is/was one of the primary aggressors in each case.

Like the Battle of Britain, the fate of Western civilization depends on the outcome of this battle; mark my words.