MTG is rarely right, but she acknowledges the GOP has no healthcare plan

Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has broken with her party in the ongoing standoff over the government shutdown. In so doing, she is effectively arguing that the Democrats are right to demand that Republicans make concessions on health care policy — although she might not wish to describe it that way. Greene shared a long post on X airing her grievances, including that “when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district.” She further lamented, “Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans” with this crisis. Greene is correct: an analysis published by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group, estimates that when enhanced subsidies expire at the end of the year, premiums for health insurance plans purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplace are expected to more than double in 2026. And she's right that GOP leaders have no plan to do anything about it. That’s exactly what Democrats are trying to prevent with their firm position on the shutdown. In addition to calling for an extension of the ACA subsidies, Democrats are calling for a repeal of the Medicaid cuts in exchange for votes to pass a government funding bill. Republicans have tried to hold the line against negotiating over those issues while the government remains shut down, but Greene has created a striking gap in their ranks. To be clear, Greene’s post also included a bunch of nonsense. She tried to create distance between herself and the Democrats by claiming that she wasn’t a fan of Obamacare to begin with because its passage allegedly made health insurance “unaffordable.” That’s false. Greene also tried to claim she was trying to create her “own lane” by arguing that she doesn’t want undocumented immigrants to have access to taxpayer-funded health care or benefits, and implied that’s what Democrats want to do. That too is false. As Georgetown University professor Leonardo Cuello has pointed out, undocumented immigrants do not have access to Medicaid and “have also never been eligible for premium tax credits to purchase Marketplace plans, and cannot even purchase a private plan on the Marketplace with their own money.” This is exactly what President Donald Trump and Republican leaders don’t want at this juncture as they try to play chicken with Democrats over the shutdown. A high-profile MAGA figure who knows how to draw attention from the media and has secured a lot of trust from the Republican base is calling out the party's leaders as wrongheaded. And despite Greene’s oddball statements that muddy the waters on the nature of Obamacare, her overall narrative that the GOP’s leadership has no plan to avert a catastrophic surge in health care prices is correct.