The nineteen-hundred-dollar premium
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John Kiriakou's commentary on the Senate's shutdown deal was not disinterested, and he said so at the outset.

His standing in the question

When the deal broke, Kiriakou's first reaction was that the Democrats "were weak and they were going to cave, and they caved." He then placed himself inside the consequence: "for those of us who are dependent on Obamacare, we all got screwed today. That's, I'm one of them."

The figures

Later in the same broadcast, as Ted Rall was working through the mechanics of how the exchanges would unwind without the subsidies, Kiriakou supplied his own numbers.

"I told you I went from roughly 900 a month to 1,900 a month," he said, "and I'm not sure how I'm going to manage this."

He did not leave it as a difficulty. "I can't do it," he said. "I don't have 1,900 a month for health insurance." Rall's response was one word, insane, and Kiriakou added the comparison that gave the figure its scale: "right now that's more than this show pays."

The wider forecast

Kiriakou's expectation was that the official estimates of how many people would drop out understated the problem. Rall put the enrolled population at 42 million and the projected non-renewals at two to four million, and called that figure implausible; Kiriakou agreed twice, "Exactly. Exactly", and framed the outcome in symmetrical terms: "if you're a Democrat, this is bad. If you're a Republican, it's still bad."

His reading of what the Democrats actually surrendered was that the concessions they won were trivial and the thing they gave up was not. The deal, he said after reading as much of it as he could find, "only gets us to January," and consists of "little stuff", guaranteed back pay for furloughed federal workers, reinstatement of people fired over previous months. "The Democrats are agreeing to all these little things, and then they're giving up the ACA subsidy. Just giving it up."

Note

The premium figures are Kiriakou's own and given without a plan name, state or insurer. He offered them as a personal illustration of a policy argument he was making, and returned immediately to the argument.

See also

- Ted Rall
- Whipping Votes
- Three Republican Congressmen
- John Kiriakou
