He Is Not Lowering the Cost. He Is Moving the Bill.

Wall of Shame — Today: Alabama Peanut Producers

Today on the Wall of Shame: the Alabama Peanut Producers PAC (Dothan) has put $5,000 into Rep. Shomari Figures' campaign account. Figures then voted no on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the same ag and tax package Wiregrass peanut farmers benefit from. The Wall of Shame exists for one reason — so that total stops growing. https://take2back.com/wall-of-shame.html

WHAT HE SAYS

Shomari Figures' position on health care is that more federal money makes care more affordable. He said it plainly to Alabama Daily News about the enhanced insurance subsidies: that we should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable, and that removing this form of premium reduction does not get us any closer to that.

He opposed the tax and spending law over its Medicaid provisions on the same reasoning.

It is a clear position, honestly held, and it is worth testing rather than shouting about. So we tested it.

THE FIFTY-EIGHT PERCENT TELLS ON HIM

Here is the number his side puts on posters. When the enhanced credits lapsed, the average monthly payment after tax credits went from $113 to $178. Fifty-eight percent, overnight.

Read it again, because it is not the argument they think it is.

Nothing happened to the care that January. No hospital raised a rate on New Year's Day. No drug got more expensive at midnight. The only thing that changed is that Washington stopped covering part of the bill — and Alabama families found out what their insurance had been costing all along.

That is not a subsidy lowering a price. That is a subsidy hiding one. The price was always $178. Families were shown $113 and told the difference was affordability.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama counts almost 500,000 Alabamians on individual marketplace plans. Half a million people in this state were quoted a number that was never the real number.

WHO ACTUALLY PAID THE OTHER SIXTY-FIVE DOLLARS

Somebody paid it. It was you.

A subsidy does not make an MRI cheaper, or a hospital cheaper to run, or a drug cheaper to manufacture. Not one dollar of cost leaves the system. It moves — off the premium line, onto the tax line, and onto the debt, where it waits and collects interest.

Shomari Figures calls that making care affordable. It is not affordability. It is cost shifting, and the shift is from your left pocket to your right, minus what Washington keeps for handling it.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COST WHILE THE CHECKS GOT BIGGER

Federal spending on health programs grew eighty percent in ten years — from $1.0 trillion in 2016 to $1.8 trillion in 2025. Washington now spends more on health programs than on Social Security, more than on defense, and more than on the interest on the national debt.

The Congressional Budget Office projects $33.6 trillion in federal health insurance subsidies between 2026 and 2036, rising from 7.4 percent of everything this country produces to 8.4 percent.

Medicare's hospital trust fund is now projected to run dry in 2040 — twelve years sooner than the estimate before it.

Costs did not come down during the largest subsidy expansion in the program's history. They went up, and the obligation went onto a card the country has not paid off.

WHY IT KEEPS GOING UP

Here is the mechanism, and it is not complicated.

When somebody else pays, the person receiving care stops asking the price, and the person charging has no particular reason to hold it down. The subsidy does not restrain the price. It follows it.

The Kaiser Family Foundation puts it about as plainly as it can be put: premium increases generally result in higher federal spending on subsidies. The money chases the bill upward.

And the bill is going up. For 2026 in Alabama, Blue Cross requested a 19.3 percent rate change, UnitedHealthcare 20 percent, and Celtic 29 percent. The reasons given are the ones that were always there — the price of care and how much of it gets used.

Every dollar Washington adds to the demand side of a market that cannot add supply that fast ends up in the price. That is not an opinion about politics. It is what prices do.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Shomari Figures is not offering to make health care cost less. He is offering to move who pays for it.

That is a real choice and voters are entitled to make it. But it should be made with the price tag visible: the money comes from the same households, collected differently, later, with interest, and with the cost of the care itself still climbing underneath.

A congressman who thinks the answer is a larger check from Washington will vote that way on every health bill for two years. He has told you so. Believe him.

Ninety-four percent of the time this summer, he voted with the caucus that agrees with him.

Polls close at seven.