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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/who-ultimately-benefits-from-the

https://theduran.com/who-ultimately-benefits-from-the-obamacare-subsidies  

Who Ultimately Benefits from the Obamacare Subsidies?

19 November 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The ‘news’-media hide — not expose — the ultimate beneficiaries of the taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies that were the source and cause of the longest U.S. Government shut-down in history, and which subsidies congressional Republicans are now trying to redirect to their big donors. 

First, the ‘news’-media’s lies (pretending that the beneficiaries were the people who purchased Obamacare insurance policies) will be reported and explained here; and, then, the truth will be reported, which was reported in an obscure place in a blog-post that still doesn’t yet have even a single reader-comment to it — so, it is very obscure indeed, but the evidences and the reasoning in that report make sense (though the author fails to link to its documentations) and are (unlike the newsmedia’s reports) relevant to answering this crucial question of whom the beneficiaries of Obamacare have been, which none of the ‘news’-media’s allegations about this matter do — nor even try to be relevant to identifying whom Obamacare’s ultimate beneficiaries have been.

A typical ‘news’-media’s report on this important question was headlined on November 16th in the Washington Post, “GOP plans to replace Obamacare have failed. Here’s what lawmakers propose now. Lawmakers are racing toward a mid-December deadline, with Republicans hoping to present side-by-side legislation with Democrats’ plan to extend ACA subsidies.” (”ACA” refers to the “Affordable Care Act,” which is Obamacare.) The key fact is that both of the Parties are controlled by America’s near-1,000 billionaires (who donate over half of all the money the Party receives), just like the nation’s press is; and, so, the pitch there (from congressional Republicans) is that whereas elected Democrats want the taxpayer-funded subsidies to remain in place, the Republicans want that money to go directly to ‘the people,” “the general public,” the “more than 20 million Americans [who] have benefited from [the] soon-to-expire ACA subsidies” — which merely ASSUMES that those individuals have been the ultimate recipients of these tax-funded subsidies, and also that each and every one of these 20 million is better-off because of Obamacare than they were prior to Obamacare (but congressional Republicans are saying that under THEIR plan, those people will be better-off receiving those subsidies directly) — but NEITHER of those assumptions is actually true. Obamacare just changed the arrangement of the deck-chairs on the Titanic.

The so-called factcheck dot org Website headlined on October 30th “Competing Claims on Who Benefits from ACA Subsidies” and was basically like those ‘news-reports are: presenting “competing claims,” instead of any intelligent analysis in order to find out whom the actual beneficiaries are.

And, finally, we come now to someone called Gary Levin (who is an M.D., trained in Ophthamology at GWU School of Medcine, and a retired professor at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine) and his “Digital Health Newsletter” blog at Linked-In, his October 9th post, “Who benefits from ACA subsidies?”, which is (unlike anything in the commercial or ‘non’-profit media), good enough for me to want to post it here in full; and, so, here it is:

Who benefits from ACA subsidies? Hint: It’s not patients, physicians, or taxpayers. Every subsidy dollar moves through a predictable chain of custody and every stop on that chain earns yield before a single claim is paid. Let’s follow the money! (1) UnitedHealth Group (UNH) The largest beneficiary of all. ACA subsidies → premium payments → float → investment income → Optum integration. They profit on the insurance side, the PBM side, and the provider side. Result: $500B market cap. Sold by lawmakers. Funded by your taxes. (2) Centene (CNC) The Medicaid king. Over 70% of its revenue comes directly from government contracts. ACA subsidies expand Medicaid → Centene gets paid per member per month. Wall Street calls this “predictable cash flow.” You call it “government dependence.” (3) Elevance (ANTM) Formerly Anthem. Biggest player on the ACA exchanges. Premium subsidies guarantee growth with zero innovation. They raise premiums, Treasury covers it, and everyone claps. (4) Humana (HUM) Specializes in Medicare Advantage — the same model, different subsidy. Every “expansion” of coverage means more taxpayer dollars into their reserves. They turn seniors into cap tables. (5) CVS Health (CVS) Not just pharmacies — they own the PBM (Caremark) and insurer (Aetna). The ACA drives prescription volume. More subsidies = more scripts = more rebate spread. They sell your medicine back to you at a markup the government pays for. (6) Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) Warren Buffett’s insurance empire (GEICO, Gen Re, Berkshire Re) feasts on subsidized premiums. Every ACA dollar increases the pool of insurable risk and investable float. Berkshire doesn’t need your premium, they need your patience. (7) JP Morgan Chase (JPM) The invisible hand behind all of it. Where do you think insurers park reserves and float? Billions in premium dollars sit in treasuries and funds until claims clear. Wall Street earns the spread; you pay the bill. (8) BlackRock & Vanguard They own the float and the firms. BlackRock is the top shareholder in every insurer on this list. Subsidies don’t create access, they create assets. And those assets are securitized, indexed, and reinvested back into the same cartel. (9) Consulting & Actuarial Firms McKinsey, Milliman, Deloitte — the architects of the labyrinth. Every tweak in subsidy policy means new contracts, new spreadsheets, new fees. It’s the business model. (10) Congress (both parties) They call it “coverage expansion.” What it really means is: guaranteed cash flow for their donors. Subsidies buy loyalty. Loyalty buys elections. And you, the taxpayer, foot the bill. So who benefits from ACA subsidies? The same people who benefit from everything else: The insurers who collect premiums. The financiers who invest the float. The asset managers who own the insurers. The politicians who collect their donations.

So, in other words, the Democratic and Republican Parties are two competing teams of billionaires, and they are in conflict over which team’s method of ripping off the American public on health care for the benefit of investors will prevail.

Unchanged after Obamacare went into effect, America continues having the highest per-person cost, and lowest-quality, healthcare of all industrialized countries, and so the healthcare corporations are very profitable but not only does the U.S. rank 50th on life-expectancy (longevity), but the public are being bankrupted by America’s uniquely high healthcare prices (very profitable for investors but bankrupting for many of the public) in order to be able to stay alive. So, this Governmental shut-down wasn’t a result of the public, or of what they want (which Obama had vaguely promised but didn’t even try to deliver, because it was inconsistent with what the billionaires want), but of the billionaires who fund the careers of the politicians (including both Parties) keeping their heist of the public going for high profits to investors. And that’s just one example of how this ‘democracy’ produces a very dissatisfied public. 

This is what the billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media refuse to report; so, I do.

The most reliable single measure of the quality of a nation’s healthcare is the nation’s individuals’ life-expectancy. Almost all countries’ life-expectancies have been rising rather steadily after WW2, except during 2020 and 2021 (covid-19, during which they declined). America’s rose from 68.14 years in 1950, to 78.74 in 2012, and Obamacare took effect in 2013 and brought the percentage of uninsured Americans down from 14.5% then, to around 8% in 2017, when it has since remained at around 8%. However, unlike in the years before 2012 when American life-expectancies were continually rising, that rise abruptly stopped in 2014 at 78.84, and it’s now at 79.40 — a rise of only 0.56 years during this entire 11-year period — the period during which Obamacare has been available. There is no evidence that Obamacare has improved health care in this country, and the life-expectancies’ data show that when Obamacare started, America’s longevity-gains stopped — the result (stasis) was even worse than it had previously been (annual improvements). That’s not necessarily a cause-effect relationship, but it IS evidence that Obamacare did not improve American health care, and might even have hurt it.

Obama had lied about his healthcare plan while running for office, and then, once in office, he secretly and privately fought against the features of it that would lower its prices and its costs, and he worked secretly with the Republicans to block those features of his plan so as to protect the capital-gains returns to the healthcare-industry’s investors (including many billionaires, many of whom are megadonors to the Democratic Party), as a result of which, both the plan’s prices to consumers, and its costs to the federal Treasury, have been far higher than he promised and that was passed into law and delivered to the public in his Obamacare (or “Affordable Care Act”); and, so, congressional Democrats today have been refusing to accept the Republican Trump Administration’s eliminating the federal subsidies that keep Obamacare (the ‘Affordable Care Act’) going (funding those megadonors’ gravy train, upon which congressional Democrats depend). The Republicans have been trying to do this (prevent and now to stop this) ever since 2010 — even before the Act was passed into law. And, all the while, America continues having the highest per-person cost, and lowest-quality, healthcare of all industrialized countries, and so the healthcare corporations are very profitable here, but not only does the U.S. rank 50th on life-expectancy (longevity), but many of the public are being bankrupted by America’s uniquely high healthcare prices in order to be able to stay alive. 

So, this Governmental shut-down wasn’t a result of the public, or of what they want (which Obama had promised), but of the billionaires who fund the careers of the politicians (including both Parties) keeping their heist of the public going for high profits to investors. 

And that’s just one example of how this ‘democracy’ produces a very dissatisfied public. It isn’t any authentic democracy.

I have proposed a way to get the extreme corruptness that plagues our Government to end, and which would produce an authentic democacy — a Government that represents the public, instead of (like now) that represents only the Parties’ megadonors.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.