Welcome to Wellness Unmas. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire, and this is your weekly rundown. Well, the Senate

rejected both the Democratic and Republican health care proposals. And frankly, this was the right call.

Now, if you haven't been watching the news, there's a bit of urgency going on in Washington right now because the expanded ACA subsidies

that happened with COVID, which is essentially a lot of federal dollars, going to insurance

companies to help afford the Affordable, AKA Unaffordable Care Act, they're set to expire

in a couple of weeks at the end of this month. Now, if those federal subsidies

are not expanded, millions of Americans are going to face significant insurance premium hikes

starting in early 2026 if they get their health care on the ACA marketplace. So Democrats are saying you absolutely have to expand those subsidies.

We do not want Americans having these high costs.

And Republicans are like, absolutely not.

The Affordable Care Act has failed.

And it is anything other than affordable.

Well, so in haste, you now have Democrats and Republicans trying to put together

bills by the end of the month to try and fix this problem. And like I said, they were both rejected,

and that was the right call. Because whether it's Medicare for all on the left or some half measures

on the right, nothing is going to work unless

we address the real damage done by the Affordable Care Act. So here's the reality. More than one

third of Americans skipped or delayed medical care last year because of the costs. So that's not

access to the care. That's failure. The ACA shifted power away from

patients and doctors and handed it to the insurers and hospital systems, fuel and consolidation,

higher prices, and ultimately lower quality. So you don't fix health care by doubling down on

what broke it to begin with.

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