Welcome to Wellness on Mass. I'm Dr. Nicole Saffeyer, and this is your weekly rundown.

Well, Friday, October 3rd, and yes, the federal government has shut down. And it's really all about immigration and health care.

Republicans say that the Democrats want to provide health coverage for illegal immigrants.

And the Democrats say that they're lying,

that Republicans are distorting facts.

So who's telling the truth?

Who's not?

Well, kind of a little bit of both.

But I figure I will just break down the facts

because by looking at social media,

it seems like a lot of people don't really understand

the nuance of it.

And even some of the politicians who are responsible for the shutdown, I don't even think they understand what's going on. So it all boils down to a couple of really big things. First of all, the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, those are set to expire. Some of the expansion subsidies that happened through COVID, they are going

to expire at the end of this year. So the Democrats are saying, we want to continue those expansion

subsidies. Republicans aren't saying no to that, actually. They're just saying, we just don't need

this in this short CR bill. We'll talk about that later. We have until the end of the year.

So that's one thing.

The other thing really just goes back to the big beautiful bill. In the big beautiful bill,

that Republican bill that got a lot of media attention, was what they did, they narrowed the

Medicaid eligibility when it comes to migrants. So Medicaid is the government-funded health insurance

for people who cannot afford it. So in the big beautiful bill, they narrowed who is eligible.

They said eligibility for Medicaid should be restricted to those, you know, full legal American citizens, those who have

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