Democrats crumble like cookies. Is this really the best they can do?

Democrats almost collapsed soft cookies.

The so-called resistance party gave speed up the fight for closureIt ensures that millions of Americans will face skyrocketing healthcare costs created by Republicans, and that millions more will be crushed by any hope that the minority party will find the substance and leadership to mount a viable defense against Trump.

sunday night, eight renegade Democrats Every American who pays for his or her own health insurance has been sold through the affordable marketplaces that President Obama created.

As has been reported extensively in recent weeks, Republicans are in a dead end making insurance financially out of reach for many Americans by refusing to help them pay premiums with subsidies that are part of current law available to both low- and middle-income families.

Republicans have long desired to kill the ACA — for reasons hard to understand other than they hate Obama and, apparently, for basic reasons like the flu vaccine — and now, thanks to Democrats, they are on the verge of doing so in spirit, if not in fact.

Trump must be doing his best old man joke In the Oval Office.

The pain this cowardly collapse will cause is already obvious. Without government subsidies, rates announced for 2026 and premiums doubled on average, according to nonpartisan health policy researchers KFF. It doubled.

Insurance companies plan to increase rates by approximately 18%, symptomatic of the need for a complete overhaul of our already disruptive and terrible system. This increase, combined with the loss of subsidies from the beginning of next year, means a 114% increase in costs for those dependent on insurance. According to KFF, premiums, which will be an average of $888 in 2025, will increase to $1,904 in 2026.

However, those who will be most affected by this will be middle-income people.

“Annual premium payments for a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 on average will increase by more than 100 percent $22,600 This means instead of paying 8.5% of all revenues towards health insurance, KFF will now jump to around 25%.

Merry Christmas, America.

While the eight Democrats who broke away from their party for allowing this to happen are directly responsible (thankfully our California senators are not among them), the Democratic leadership also needs to be held accountable.

A party that cannot hold itself together with really big votes is not a party. A group of people who occasionally have lunch together. They literally had one job: to stay together.

The failure of the Democratic leadership to ensure that Senate votes were not overturned at this intense moment is not only embarrassing but also demoralizing. Even as Republican members of Congress are condemned for failing in their duty to check presidential power, here’s the opposition party poking around on an important issue like health care.

as california Representative Ro Khanna he wrote on social media: “Senator Schumer is no longer effective and needs to be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums for Americans from skyrocketing, what will you fight for?”

If there are any lessons to be learned from the last election, it’s that Democrats and voters in general require courage. Love or hate Zohran Mamdani, much of his victory as mayor of New York was due to his courage to forge his own path. Same with Governor Gavin Newsom and Proposition 50.

Mamdani expressed this feeling best in his victory speechIt promises an era in which people “can expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we can achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we hesitate to undertake.”

Before you start sending me angry emails, yes, I understand how much pain the shutdown has caused, especially for furloughed workers and those about to see their SNAP benefits cut. I feel sorry for everyone who doesn’t know how to pay their bills.

But here are the facts we cannot forget. Republicans deliberately intensified this pain to upset Democrats. Trump found ways to do this pays deportation officers, At the same time, critical workers such as airport monitors and air traffic controllers remain unpaid, while the chaos resulting from their absence is both visible and devastating. He also threatened to not give some of these people back their wages once this was over.

And on the give-or-take-it front, he was actually ordered by the courts to pay his SNAP benefits and is fighting that. Republicans could easily band together and demand that the money be distributed while the rest is distributed, but they don’t want that. They wanted people to starve so the Democrats would break up, and it worked.

But at what cost?

Approximately 24 million people will be affected by these premium increases, remains up to 4 million They cannot maintain their insurance. I can’t go to the doctor for routine care. We cannot afford cancer treatment costs. Not being able to have that lump, that pain, that broken bone. They cannot get their children vaccinated against flu.

In many ways, this isn’t California’s problem. The majority of these people are in southern Republican states that refused to expand Medicaid when they had the chance. About 6 out of 10 subsidy recipients According to KFF, Florida is represented by Republicans led by residents of Georgia and Mississippi. But Americans have made clear that we want access to care for all of us as a right, not an expensive privilege.

Which makes it all the more mysterious that Democrats are so willing to give in on an issue that unites voters across parties, demographics and seemingly endless divides.

But I guess that’s how the cookie crumbles.