ACA premiums will likely take their biggest jump in a while

No surprise here.

Next year, Americans who buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges are set to pay significantly more for coverage—and experts say policies advanced by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are at least partially to blame.

An analysis released Friday by the health policy research organization KFF and the Peterson Center on Healthcare found that across a sample of more than 105 ACA marketplace insurers in 19 states and the District of Columbia, companies are set to increase premiums by a median of 15%.

The analysis noted that insurers have cited a number of factors to justify pushing up premiums, including Trump's tariffs—which could drive up drug, equipment, and supply costs—and the expectation that the Republican-controlled Congress will not extend ACA tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year. - Common Dreams

Establishment Democrats and "distraction" claims

This blockquote is from a very righteous screed well worth reading in full.

All of that said, there's some idiot camped out near the very center of Democratic strategy circles who has convinced the party that American voters are stupid, the Democratic base is malevolent, and that the party can and should brush off the vast sweep of authoritarian cruelties being inflicted on the country to focus instead on the real issue, which is whatever one thing the strategists have finally cobbled together talking points for. Everything else? Deploying the military to American cities to allegedly "liberate" them from the political opposition? Countless illegal impoundments of congressionally mandated funds? Mass deportations, and extralegal renditions to foreign prisons? White House corruption so vast that it now accounts for the majority of Trump's wealth?

All of that is a distraction, goes the party-issued talking points. Everything is a distraction from everything else, and you're the fool for spreading your alarm around. Like a sucker…

Calling up the United States military against American citizens is not a distraction. The nullification of congressional budgeting powers is not a distraction. A president selling a memecoin transparently designed to be a vehicle for bribery is not a distraction. An orchestrated strategy of seizing immigrants who dare show up for their own immigration hearings is not a distraction. Whirling tariff policies that seem to have little purpose other than one man's self-aggrandizement are not a distraction. None of it is a distraction, not rampant D.O.G.E. lawbreaking or defiance of court orders or the pardoning and elevation of violent seditionists or the installation of a page-long list of transparently incompetent cranks and corruption-enablers as top government officials. - Uncharted Blue