Rabat — Forty days of US government shutdown may be close to an end as Democratic and Independent senators break ranks and join Republicans in a vote that will not only reopen the government, but also defund subsidized healthcare, which will in turn send healthcare premiums skyrocketing for millions of Americans.
Republican-majority Congress seeks in its new budget to effectively slash Obamacare, or a form of public healthcare in the United States, which Republicans have long decried as less effective and more costly overall than privatized healthcare.
The Senate required a majority vote of 60-40 to launch a formal debate over the bill, which could kickstart the grueling process of reopening the government.
Democratic and Independent senators previously stuck to party lines in a bloc, adamant that they would not permit their constituents’ healthcare prices to rise, in many cases, beyond affordability. In October, insurance companies across the US issued letters to policy-holders with updated rates for the next year.
‘People are being hurt’
In many cases, prices went up by hundreds of dollars.
Nevertheless, as the US shutdown has wound on and government employees go unpaid and government functions go undone—leaving food benefits undistributed, air travel grounded, and hundreds of thousands of Americans unpaid—enough senators have conceded to Republican demands to begin the process of reopening the government.
Sen. Angus King (I-M.E.), who led negotiations for the concession, said in a statement that “many people are being hurt” by the shutdown and that his vote was a response to that pain.
Another senator, Sen. John Fetterman (D-P.A.), posted on social media that he had been a “consistent voice against shutting our government down” and issued an apology to those who had gone unpaid or hungry because of the shutdown.
Such apologies signal victory for the GOP and its leader, US President Donald Trump, who have labeled the shutdown a “Democrat” shutdown while waiting staunchly for Democrats to concede to their demands.
The shutdown has been the longest in US history and is symbolic of the widening rift between political parties. The longest government shutdowns have all occurred in the tenures of the last several presidents—with the second-longest, a 35-day shutdown in 2018, taking place during Trump’s first tenure.
