Voters reportedly favor Republican candidates by a whopping 46 points “when calling for greater transparency around insurers’ profits, claim denials and wait times for patient care, while hitting Democrats for ‘lining insurers’ pockets,” according to White House polling.

That was the message to Senate Republican campaign strategists during an August 5, 2026, briefing by Deputy Chief of Staff for Legislative, Political, and Public Affairs James Blair, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, and Senate Leadership Fund Executive Director Alex Latcham.

“Banning congressional stock trading and cracking down on fraud also emerged as potentially powerful issues, with 44- and 38-point advantages for Republicans, respectively,” Axios reported after reviewing slides from the briefing package.

There is a fascinating backstory on this issue of health care insurers offering coverage through Obamacare while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in direct tax-funded subsidies to do so: The mainstream media (MSM) has consistently given positive coverage to the subsidies since they were enacted by Congress at the insistence of then-President Joe Biden in 2021.

But throughout the history of the Obamacare program, the MSM has all but ignored the fact that those subsidies — which totaled $125 billion in 2024 alone — were paid directly to the insurers, not to the policyholders. Insurers were also returning millions of dollars in campaign contributions to congressional Democrats.

Despite that paucity of media attention on the issue, the GOP has a huge edge in the 2026 midterm elections when they talk about stopping the taxpayer-funded premium subsidy bonanza Obamacare provides to its Democratic advocates in Congress. That 46-point GOP edge may well reflect the declining influence of the MSM and the growing significance of alternative media like The Washington Stand. 

In fact, a deep-dive search of coverage of the issue by ChatGPT turned up this conclusion: “Based on a search of major general-news and health-insurance trade publications, The Washington Stand’s October 21, 2025, reportappears to be the earliest news story identifying the enormous ACA premium-subsidy stream as a major source of insurer revenue while examining the industry’s efforts to preserve those subsidies in Congress.” TWS double-checked the provided links to confirm the accuracy of their description, but there is always the possibility with ChatGPT and other AI platforms of missing key information.

Those efforts at preserving the subsidies included nearly 900 paid lobbyists working on Capitol Hill and hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Democratic incumbents and challengers. Among much else, the 2025 report in TWS noted that Centene, the largest Obamacare insurer by market share, overwhelmingly favored Democrats in the firm’s campaign contributions:

“Centene gave $38.88 million to Democratic Senate contenders during the 2018-2024 period, compared to $19.16 million to GOP Senate candidates. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was the recipient of Centene’s biggest individual contribution, at $225,262 out of a total of $634,223 to six Democrats during the 2024 campaign cycle. The Centene total to the four GOP recipients in the firm’s top 10 came to $348,478, slightly more than half the Democrat total.”

Interestingly, ChatGPT observed that the very next day, The Washington Post followed TWS in reporting that “Elevance Health spent about $2 million lobbying in Q3 2025, up 67% year over year, and more than $5.9 million during the first nine months of 2025. It also reported that AHIP spent $4.2 million in Q3 alone, up 65% from the comparable 2024 quarter.”

Five days later, TWS returned to the issue amid the record-long government shutdown caused by Democrats’ demand that the insurer subsidies be extended beyond their previously scheduled end on December 31, 2025: “Health care insurance lobbyists are a key segment of the overall health sector that will spend more than $439 million in 2025 lobbying Congress, executive branch departments, and regulatory agencies.” As TWS previously reported, the giant corporations represented by this immense legion of lobbyists spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year in political contributions.

“A decisive majority of those donations go to Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and his Democratic colleagues, who refuse to end the shutdown unless extremely lucrative ‘temporary’ health care tax subsidies that pour billions of tax dollars into the health care insurers’ coffers are made permanent.”

Nine days later, the Texas Tribune reported that the subsidies “are paid directly to insurers” but said nothing about campaign contributions going back to congressional Democrats, who were shutting down the government in an effort to force President Donald Trump to reverse his prior decision to allow those tax dollars going to the insurers to expire.

The silence in the MSM on the fact that hundreds of billions of tax dollars were being paid by the federal government directly to health insurers in the Obamacare program — and that those same insurers were going to great lengths to keep the tax dollars coming — almost certainly represented a choice to ignore a hugely important political and health care news story.

There was no lack of published facts on the issue. The first allusion to it in a major media outlet was in a June 19, 2024 op-ed by Paragon Health Institute President Brian Blasé that spotlighted the fact that the premium subsidies were encouraging fraudulent enrollments, while noting the premium subsidies were paid directly to the insurers.

There were also official reports that dealt with various aspects of the premium subsidy controversy. A June 24, 2024, report by the House Ways and Means Committee said CBO and JCT reported that “Democrats’ plan to permanently extend the expanded Obamacare subsidies would cost taxpayers $383 billion over the next 10 years. Furthermore, they confirmed high-income individuals will receive fully taxpayer-subsidized health insurance under the policy. Just five years ago, annual spending on Obamacare subsidies was $57 billion. In 2024, annual spending on Obamacare subsidies is projected to more than double to $125 billion. Biden’s proposal to make permanent the expanded subsidies will continue to skyrocket as the cost of health insurance rises in response to the inflationary subsidies.”

A November 6, 2024, news story in Vox reported the $125 billion cost figure and pointed out that insurers would likely lobby to protect the subsidies but said nothing about the fact that those subsidies were paid directly to them.

The ChatGPT analysis also determined that prior to the Oct. 21, 2025 TWS reporting, multiple health care insurance trade publications — Healthcare Dive,Fierce Healthcare, BenefitsPRO, and KFF Health News pieces republished by HealthLeaders — covered the subsidies, and noted that industry lobbyists were hard at work seeking to persuade congressional leaders to make permanent those payments from the U.S. Treasury to the insurers. But none of those stories included the information about the 2024 total cost of $125 billion for the subsidies.