I started writing this article about three weeks ago, when the government initially shut down. Then I shelved it. There were plenty of articles already written, and it is, by definition, a politically charged topic. However, it does directly impact our finances, and it hasn’t gone away.
I have been writing about government shutdowns for quite a while. My wife, a military pharmacist, is an essential worker. That means she continues to work. In the past, I had been very concerned about whether she was going to get paid during the shutdowns. That was my first time experiencing this in 2011. In 2013, I celebrated having a great emergency fund, but thankfully we didn’t need to use it. The last one in 2018, my wife almost had to run the office, which meant losing work-from-home (commuting 5 hours round-trip each day), while not being paid. Our kids were four and six at the time, so that would have been stressful. It turned out that she didn’t have to go to the office every day and was getting paid.
All of the potential problems were avoided. That’s another reason why I shelved this article. Writing about this topic feels like a combination of Chicken Little and crying wolf. Also, the kids are older now, and our finances are in a much, much better position than they were during the last shutdown.
This Government Shutdown is Different
This is where I have to get political, because this is the oddest of all shutdowns. In a lot of ways, neither side’s goals seem to make any sense. I’ll get to why in a little bit, but first I’ll explain each side’s position (in case you’ve been lost in a jungle for the last month):
- The Republicans want to simply fund the government in the short term. They aren’t looking for any political “wins.”
- The Democrats are trying to get the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare (ACA) pandemic credits extended.
In almost any situation, the Republicans have an easy political win. Americans overwhelmingly want the government open, and the Republicans want to do that.
This may be the only exception. The Democrats have identified a problem for many Americans. If the ACA credits are NOT extended, the ACA premiums are going to more than double on average. So if a family was paying $800 a month, their bill would jump to around $1700 on average. That would be a nightmare for many families who are eligible for the credits.
The issue of tax credits is so dire that the elected Republican president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners has been warning the politicians of the problem in Washington all year. This Republican (and other Republicans in the group) is siding with the Democrats. If the Democrats don’t get their way and the credits are not extended, many Americans will correctly be able to blame Republicans for the incredible inflation.
The Republicans want to keep the budget balanced and have never been a fan of Obamacare/ACA. I suspect that they’ll just blame the increases on a systemic problem with the ACA that the Democrats created. That could work, but two-thirds of Americans like the ACA, and as they learned in the Presidential debate last year, Trump has spent ten years and only has “concepts of a plan” when it comes to anything different.
In a lot of ways, Democrats are actually doing a favor for the Republicans by preventing the public blowback if the credits expire. Politically, if they get their way, they should be able to campaign that they saved the day for these families relying on the ACA. For full disclosure, I’m in the Democrat camp. In this K-shaped economy, drastically increasing expenses on those hit the hardest should be something we are all against.
The thing that baffles me is that Republicans have attacked Democrats by falsely saying that they want to give illegal/undocumented immigrants healthcare. The ACA overwhelmingly is for the American people – illegal aliens can’t even get coverage. Every social media platform should immediately correct the misinformation. It is possible that a few illegal aliens skirt the system, but they are the exceptions. Let’s imagine that Elon Musk decided to give all his money away to American citizens. I can’t imagine anyone would object to the whole plan if it were possible that a couple of illegal immigrants might somehow get a dollar or two by mistake.
At the start of the shutdown, Republicans claimed that they could revisit the issue in December. The problem with that is that open enrollment is November 1st, and everyone should know what the premiums are going to be. It doesn’t make sense to put it off until the last minute – unless the entire plan is to not do it at all. If the Republicans’ only problem with the Democrats’ healthcare request is a month or two of timing, why not begin negotiations? Why let three weeks go by with the government closed and not even talk about it? It’s not like any politician has anything more important to do.
There has been a lot of stuff that hasn’t made sense to me about this shutdown. Republicans started to lay off government employees. Laying off workers feels like watching my kids get into an argument and then one says to the other, “If you don’t do what I say, I’ll poke my eye out.” The natural response is, “Umm, okay, go ahead. It’s your eye. You’re going to have to live with the repercussions of having one eye.”
If you are trying to govern a country, you need employees. I suppose if your goal is just to break stuff and create chaos for the American people, then layoffs might make sense. I don’t know how it’s a political “win” for Republicans to say, “It’s been three months since we passed the bill that cut health care to give tax cuts to billionaires. Let’s now keep the government shut down and lay off people because we don’t want to discuss giving Americans access to more affordable health care.” I suppose that’s what makes me a Democrat.
The Lazy Man Household
Phew, with all that political stuff, now you know why I shelved the article originally. This shutdown for us is unlike the other ones. Like the last ones, there was initial uncertainty on whether my wife would need to work without pay. Unlike the other times, it was resolved after a few days or a week that she would get paid as normally scheduled. She’s never missed a single paycheck. This time they’ve come back to explicitly tell her that she won’t get paid.
Less than one hour after that notice came out, an entire group of hundreds of pharmacists had to attend a presentation on a new policy. The policy expands the time that they could be deployed from a maximum of one month to four months. (When my wife signed up, the maximum was two weeks.) Also, in the past, it required some kind of crisis or emergency, such as a hurricane or an outbreak like Ebola ten years ago. Now, they don’t need an emergency – it can simply be, “we could use more people in this part of the country” because we staffed poorly.
One of the things about being a pharmacist is that there’s no need to choose the military. There are plenty of jobs, pretty much anywhere – many of which pay more. (Though I admit that the military benefits and retirement pension are top-notch.) One of the reasons why they came up with this policy about moving people for four months at a time is that they can’t recruit people efficiently. People aren’t choosing it like they have in the past.
I would love to explain to them that the new policy creates a much bigger recruitment problem and adds a retention problem. It’s hard to say that retention is a “problem”, though, because the administration is laying off people. It’s a wonder that any pharmacists are still around. Their boss is actively campaigning against decades of proven public health policies in nearly 200 countries worldwide to promote disproven vaccine conspiracy theories.
Whoops, I almost slipped into politics, but caught myself because vaccines are firmly in the science category. I’d better end this article before I get any closer to making political comments.
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