The Democrats were furious Monday over eight senators who caved to support a deal to end the government shutdown that does not include the Affordable Care Act subsidies their party had spent weeks fighting for.
The offending lawmakers include Democratic Senators Dick Durbin, Tim Kaine, Jacky Rosen, John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and independent Senator Angus King, who claimed that they’d ensured a Senate vote on extending the tax credits. Their capitulation comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted for weeks that he wouldn’t promise them a vote on anything, and even if he does follow through with a vote, it’s unlikely such a measure will pass the House.
Democratic lawmakers slammed their colleagues for forfeiting health care coverage for an estimated 5.1 million Americans by 2034 and increasing premiums across the marketplace.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders railed against the deal while speaking before the Senate Sunday. “If this vote succeeds, over 20 million Americans are gonna see at least a doubling in their premiums in the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “For certain groups of people, it will be a tripling and a quadrupling of their premiums. There are people who will now be paying 50 percent of their limited incomes for health care. Does anybody in the world think that makes sense?”
For this to happen by pure chance, that 8 randomly selected people from a group of 48 includes none of the 13 that are up for re-election, the odds are 6.2%. Not impossible but unlikely enough to doubt it’s a coincidence.
(For math people: this can be modeled as a hypergeometric distribution with N=48, K=13, n=8, k=0.)
I suspect most people haven’t heard these terms. But they should have studied basic combinatorics in high school, and that’s all it really is. You had a pool of 48 people from whom to choose 8, but you happened to choose them from the specific pool of 35 not up for reelection. So the likelihood of that happening randomly is just 35 choose 8 / 48 choose 8, which is indeed 6.2%.