By KIM BELLARD
Although most ACA enrollees or potential enrollees have made their 2026 enrollment decisions assuming that expanded premium subsidies will not be renewed, renewal of those subsidies is not entirely dead. Last week the House narrowly approved an extensionrelying on a petition for exoneration and 17 Republican congressmen willing to go against his leadership. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) is leading an effort to introduce a bill that also expands them.
It is uncertain whether it will ultimately pass, as is how and when it might be reconciled with the House bill, and the President I could just veto any extension that may arise. Expanded subsidies are not dead yet, they are just “mostly dead.” How would I say miracle max?.
The apparent indifference to the concerns of more than twenty million ACA members is appalling, but it has character. This is a Republican Administration and Congress that doesn’t like SNAP, Medicaid, school lunches, or helping hungry people in Third World countries, among other things. If you are poor, they think, what a shame; Get a job, or a better job, and get up. No brochures.
If they were against federal subsidies in general, out of fiscal prudence or other guiding principles, I might respect them. I wouldn’t agree with it, but at least it would be intellectually honest. The problem is that they are not against subsidies per se; They just don’t like it when they go to the poor. That is, those who need them most.
What drove me to this was a ProPublica/High Country News investigation to grazing on public lands. If you live in the East, you probably don’t think much about grazing or public lands, but if you live in the West, you’re probably very familiar with both. Almost 50% o land in the western states is federally owned. It ranges from 85% in Nevada to 4% in North Dakota. Nearly half of California is federal land. You could be forgiven for assuming that federal lands must be national parks, but they are small compared to the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).
According ProPública: “The federal government allows cattle grazing on an area of publicly owned land more than twice the size of California, making ranching the largest land use in the West.” Well, you might think that’s not inherently bad; We could also use the land for something, maybe even make a little money off it. That’s the problem; the federal government is practically giving it away. Their analysis found that the grazing fees charged equated to a 93% discount relative to the market rate. You read that right: ninety-three percent. That’s not a discount, it’s a gift.
Okay, that’s telling, but if it helps a group of ranchers struggling to survive, maybe it’s not so bad; ranching dates back to frontier times and has a certain cowboy appeal. Unfortunately, that stereotype is not entirely true.
ProPública found:
A small number of wealthy individuals and corporations manage most livestock on public lands. Our analysis found that approximately two-thirds of BLM acreage grazing is controlled by just 10% of ranchers. And on Forest Service lands, 10% of permit holders control more than 50% of the grazing. Among the largest ranchers are billionaires such as Stan Kroenke and Rupert Murdoch, as well as mining companies and utilities.
To be fair, there are a large number of small livestock operators who also take advantage of grazing on federal lands; it’s just not the operations that do most of the grazing.
As if wealthy ranchers aren’t already benefiting, the Trump Administration wants to increase subsidies and reduce oversight. But of course it is. Instead of being a protector of public lands, BLM has become an enabler of their exploitation. Current and former BLM employees said ProPública about the political pressure that was applied every time they tried to do something that could be considered “anti-grazing.”
It’s not just about the ranchers. We like to think of family farmers working their land and providing tens of billions in aid to farmers, but, according to the Environmental Working Group:
…the vast majority of farmers do not benefit from federal farm subsidy programs, and most subsidies go to the largest, most financially secure farming operations. Small commodity producers receive a mere pittance, while meat producers f[r]Food and vegetables are almost completely left out of the subsidy game (i.e., they can enroll in subsidized crop insurance and often receive federal disaster payments).
Meanwhile, the Trump administration boasts about how he is “taking big steps to put America’s public lands to work for the American people,” which means that if you want to drill for oil or gas, extract coal, cut down forests, paying little and without worrying about environmental concerns, you’re in luck. But by “American people” we mean “rich American people.”
Similarly, the subsidies that go to the US fossil fuel industry are difficult to pin down, but a Oil Change International 2025 Analysis He estimated them at $31 billion annually, double what they were in 2017. And that was before the “big, beautiful bill.” added even more to the subsidies.
Don’t even get me started on how corporations and wealthy individuals manage to evade federal taxes, for example through the carried interest loophole. Not many poor people benefit from that.
Yes, perhaps the ACA expanded credits were expanded too much and, yes, there may be some fraud in the program. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater by simply letting it expire is draconian. The estimated $30 billion in annual costs for subsidies is not trivial, but I would rather spend it on ensuring that millions of people can get or maintain health coverage than give it to ranchers, farmers, or rich oil companies.
Kim is a former e-marketing executive at a major Blues scheme, publisher of the late and lamented Tincture.ioand now a regular THCB contributor
