Schumer Shutdown Day 27 dawns today with millions of members of the U.S. military and the federal civilian workforce going without paychecks for multiple weeks. One group of major Washington players who are not missing paychecks is the nearly 900 lobbyists working for the health care insurance industry.

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 The Washington Stand 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. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBBA) includes the scheduled December 31 end of the subsidies. Senate and House Democrats previously voted overwhelmingly in favor of that deadline for the tax subsidies.

The shutdown began October 1, the first day of the federal government’s 2026 fiscal year, because Congress failed yet again to enact the 12 major appropriations bills needed to continue funding after fiscal year 2025 ended. A continuing resolution (CR) that made no policy changes but kept the government open until November 21 passed the House, but Senate Democrats have defeated it on 12 separate votes in the upper chamber.

The temporary tax subsidies were first enacted for two years in 2021 during the COVID pandemic at the request of then-President Joe Biden and then extended to 2025. The purpose was to enable more people to sign up for health care insurance under Obamacare, which had suffered disappointingly low enrollment rates and soaring premium costs prior to the pandemic.

“Obamacare is unaffordable. If it was affordable, quality care, Congress would not even be discussing subsidies right now. The fact of the matter is that the government is paying exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money directly from the Treasury to insurers and not seeing much of anything good in return,” Brittany Madni, executive vice president of the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank, told The Washington Stand.

Separately, in an EPIC analysis entitled “Cashing in on Obamacare Subsidies,” Madni described how the “temporary” subsidies enriched the big health care insurers:

“To cover up the extraordinary cost of plans and trick people into participating, Obamacare created a subsidy scheme to hide the true cost from enrollees and taxpayers alike by sending subsidies straight from the U.S. Treasury to health insurance companies.

“This scheme does nothing to actually control premium rates; instead, it drives costs up and quality down at the expense of the American taxpayer, just like all other government subsidies. To add to the problem, the Biden Administration supersized these subsidies during the COVID pandemic. Extending these temporary COVID Credit subsidies would cost taxpayers another $410 billion.”

Due to the excessively complicated regulatory structure of the program, there are hundreds of thousands of high-income individuals benefitting from the Obamacare tax subsidies, according to the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman, authors of “End Obamacare’s Welfare for the Wealthy Covid Credits.”

“[Obamacare] Marketplace enrollment was relatively stable from 2017 to 2020. Since the enhanced subsidies were implemented in 2021, however, total enrollment has more than doubled from 12 million in 2021 to 24.32 million in 2025. Meanwhile, the number of Marketplace enrollees with incomes above 400 percent of the [Federal Poverty Level] FPL has quadrupled, from roughly 400,000 in 2021 to over 1.5 million in 2025, according to [Kaiser Family Foundation] KFF estimates,” they report.

Boccia and Turman point to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of how permanently extending the temporary COVID tax subsidies would grow Obamacare enrollment and add nearly half a trillion dollars to the tax burdens facing Americans.

“The CBO estimates that making the subsidies permanent would only further exacerbate the ongoing enrollment surge among well-off households, attracting an additional 6.9 million people, each year on average, to the ACA Marketplace through 2034. Half of these new enrollees would earn above 400 percent of the FPL. This caseload expansion would account for 89 percent of the subsidy’s $415 billion in direct additional costs over the same period,” Boccia and Turman said.

Considering the seismic shift of upper-income individuals from being mostly Republican voters and donors to now being overwhelmingly Democratic voters and donors, it’s reasonable to assume a measure that directly benefits an estimated 3.5 million upper-income voters will also benefit Schumer and company on Election Day.

With so much at stake, it should come as no surprise that health care insurers are spending so much on lobbying Congress and anybody else in the nation’s capital with influence on such issues, especially considering that the Obamacare tax subsidies have been at center stage throughout the year.

So far in 2025, the 10 biggest insurers in Obamacare have collectively spent nearly $24 million on lobbying activities, with UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurance operation, on top at $7,830,000, according to data compiled by opensecrets.org. Most of that spending came between January and July 2025 as Congress debated the OBBBA.

Elevance has spent $5.9 million thus far in 2025, with much of that coming in the third quarter as the CR confrontation in Congress loomed. Others in the top 10 include Cigna at $5.35 million, CVS Health at $5.3 million, and Centene at $2.4 million.

In other words, by demanding the permanent extension of temporary Obamacare tax subsidies, Schumer and his Democratic Senate colleagues have shut down the federal government to protect special interests that provide politicians hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and spend lavishly on lobbying to keep the pressure on lawmakers.

As Boccia and Turman put it:

“As the government shutdown continues, Democrats are demanding that Republicans make the pandemic-era ‘Obamacare COVID credits’ permanent as their price for reopening the government. These partisan subsidies — passed without a single Republican vote — now make households earning up to $600,000 a year eligible for taxpayer-funded health insurance. Permanently extending Obamacare’s enhanced premium tax credits would entrench this subsidy that funnels health care benefits to the affluent.”

Former President Ronald Reagan put it a bit more succinctly, often quipping that “actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing we’ll ever see on this Earth to eternal life.”