Obamacare Battle Brews & Hollywood Suffers Slump | 11.14.25

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Speaker 2 The end of the shutdown sets the stage for a new battle on Capitol Hill, the fate of Obamacare.

Speaker 1 As pandemic-era subsidies head toward expiration, why are Democrats so insistent on saving them?

Speaker 3 The people that are watching, it's like the Democrats. We, we, we designed these to expire.
This wasn't something the Republicans are taking. That's how we designed this.

Speaker 2 I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, November 14th.
This is Morning Wire.

Speaker 4 $49.8 million for the entire Halloween weekend domestically. You have to go back to the 90s again to find a box office that low for Halloween.

Speaker 1 Hollywood suffers a monstrous slump in October as big name directors sound the alarm over what they say has become a broken system.

Speaker 2 And a federal contracting program meant to lift up minority-owned businesses finds itself in a swamp of fraud accusations.

Speaker 1 Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned.
We have the news you need to know.

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Speaker 1 With the shutdown finally ended, the fight between Democrats and Republicans over healthcare subsidies and the fate of Obamacare is only ramping up.

Speaker 2 Here, the latest on the healthcare battle raging in D.C. is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestis Giacomo Hayamanda.

Speaker 2 So Democrats largely blame their unwillingness to reopen the government on health care. Republicans won that first round, but we're nowhere near done.

Speaker 2 So first, walk us through these Obamacare subsidies, which are really at the heart of this issue.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so these Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare subsidies, were expanded during COVID in 2021.

Speaker 6 The subsidies, which are technically tax credits, they were only supposed to last two years, but Democrats extended them once again, and now they're expiring at the end of this year.

Speaker 6 Currently, there are about 24 million Americans who are on ACA plans. That's up from 11 million at the start of the pandemic.
So a huge increase due in large part to these subsidies.

Speaker 6 It's estimated that about 42% of 2025 ACA enrollees pay less than $10 a month, with a vast majority paying nothing at all. Notably, Democrats removed the income cap for subsidy eligibility.

Speaker 6 So people who are earning over 400% of the federal poverty level, they qualify for these subsidies as well.

Speaker 6 Now, as for the cost of all of this, the Congressional Budget Office says that extending the subsidies through 2035, that would increase the federal deficit by about $358 billion.

Speaker 2 Why are Democrats so insistent that these subsidies are the answer?

Speaker 6 Yeah, well, Democrats, there have been reports that they really want to make the midterms all about health care.

Speaker 6 And their message is that inaction from Republicans here will drive up health care costs for millions of Americans.

Speaker 6 I spoke to Ryan Long, a senior research fellow at Paragon Health Institute, to explain all of this.

Speaker 6 And he said that if these subsidies expire as scheduled, people on ACA plans will once again return to paying something, even if it's just a very small amount, instead of having access to these zero-dollar plans.

Speaker 6 He said that those zero-dollar plans actually have led to a lot of widespread fraud and abuse.

Speaker 7 At Paragon, we believe that there's upwards of 6 million people that aren't actually within that income category that are claiming credits as if they were in that income category.

Speaker 7 In certain states, there are three to four times as many people enrolled in 100 to 150% of poverty, these zero-dollar plans, than there are people actually in those income brackets.

Speaker 7 So these COVID credits have just produced massive amounts of fraud.

Speaker 2 And Republicans, they generally don't want to extend these subsidies. What are their arguments?

Speaker 6 Yeah, they want them to expire when the Democrats scheduled them to expire. They argue that Obamacare is a failure.
It's in need of serious reforms or a whole new system.

Speaker 6 Premiums, for example, they rose 143% in the first six years after the ACA took effect. And next year, premiums are set to rise another 26%.
CMS Administrator Dr.

Speaker 6 Mehmet Oz, for example, he just recently went off on the many problems with Obamacare and how he sees American taxpayers effectively being cheated.

Speaker 8 Today, it's over 11 million people who have Obamacare never use their policy, which means they often don't know they have it. And yet we're still stuck with the bill.

Speaker 8 When Obamacare was created, they take a step back because this is the original vision. 50% of the people in Obamacare were supposed to be paid for by the government.

Speaker 8 50% were supposed to be spending their own money. Now it's 95% government funded because we drove out all the private sector people by overpaying.

Speaker 6 As for the fate of Obamacare, President Trump has really amped up his calls to move on from the quote Obamacare madness. Here's Trump on Wednesday.

Speaker 9 I'm calling today for insurance companies not to be paid, but for the money, this massive amount of money to be paid directly to the people of our country so that they can buy their own health care.

Speaker 6 Trump already seems to be getting a lot of support from congressional Republicans.

Speaker 6 In fact, Florida Senator Rick Scott says that he's writing up legislation to put this HSA-style account idea into action.

Speaker 2 All right, so maybe witnessing the beginning of the end of Obamacare here. We'll see.
Amanda, thanks so much for reporting.

Speaker 6 You're welcome.

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Speaker 2 Hollywood is in a major slump with October marking the worst box office revenues in nearly 30 years. Even Halloween weekend, usually a horror cash machine, failed to draw audiences.

Speaker 1 Here to explain what's ailing Tinseltown is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham. So Megan, not great news on the horizon for Hollywood right now.
What's going on?

Speaker 10 Yeah, Georgia. So as John said, this has been the worst October on record since 1997, with the exception, of course, of that COVID pandemic year when the theaters were all closed.

Speaker 10 But perhaps even more alarming is the fact that this was the worst Halloween weekend in 31 years. So, really, nobody came out to theaters.
Nobody got any of that box office revenue up.

Speaker 10 And I think a big culprit here is the fact that there were simply no must-see movies.

Speaker 10 Even those movies that had big stars and where Hollywood tried to generate a lot of buzz, well, audiences weren't really interested and the reviews were pretty mediocre.

Speaker 10 So, just to to go through some of them: Disney's Tron Aries opened to only 38 million. That was the franchise's worst debut.

Speaker 10 A24's The Smashing Machine with big A lister Dwayne Johnson, you would expect that to go big. It didn't, it made only 11 million.
And then there was the Bruce Springsteen bio pick.

Speaker 10 A lot of people were excited for that, we thought, but it only made 9 million. So, the total October take here was only 425 million.

Speaker 10 By comparison, The Joker made more than double that for the month of October alone, just six years ago. That's how bad things are.

Speaker 10 Now, the first couple of releases that we're seeing in November aren't faring much better.

Speaker 10 A lot of people thought that Christie starring it girl Sidney Sweeney would blow up the box office, but turned out to be a major flop.

Speaker 10 You do have some people blaming politics on that, but I think that's probably a stretch.

Speaker 10 I would say more likely the explanation here is that Sidney Sweeney's core fan base of young men who like to see her looking young and gorgeous were not so interested in seeing her play an unattractive tomboy type boxer.

Speaker 10 Veteran Com score analyst Paul DeGaribidian told finance outlet Cheddar News that without a couple of Japanese anime movies that actually outperformed expectations, the story here would be even worse.

Speaker 4 There was just nothing commercially exciting enough to mainstream audiences to drive them in huge numbers. And, you know,

Speaker 4 last year there was a Venom movie that opened at $50 million in October. We didn't have that this year.
And so I think that definitely hurt the box office.

Speaker 4 Also, August was down about 25% over August of last year. September down only about 2%.
You had the conjuring in the mix there.

Speaker 4 Again, if not for those anime movies, we'd be looking at an even worse situation.

Speaker 1 So is this just the ongoing disruption we've talked about from streaming and or social media? Or or is there something more fundamental going on?

Speaker 10 I mean, yes, obviously, that kind of creative destruction is always playing a role, but not necessarily in the way that we think.

Speaker 10 So, you're hearing from a lot of veteran filmmakers that are complaining that the way Hollywood does business is no longer the same, and it is much harder to get creative ideas greenlit than it was in the past.

Speaker 10 So, because of that, what we're seeing is audience is getting kind of tired of seeing the same old safe scripts.

Speaker 10 So you have these well-known, well-established filmmakers, people like Michael Bay and James Cameron, complaining that creative ideas just aren't able to get across the finish line anymore.

Speaker 10 And they say that something bigger may be broken in Hollywood. In an interview just a few months ago, Bay voiced frustration over what he called a system afraid of risk.

Speaker 10 Now, we're talking about somebody who is the king of big blockbusters. And even he now says that he's turning to independent filmmaking so that he he can be more creative.

Speaker 10 He said that Cameron told him that no individual executives are empowered to greenlight those creative ideas anymore.

Speaker 10 And so the result is too many sequels, too few original ideas, and a growing reliance on the algorithm to decide what gets made.

Speaker 1 Well, and if you look at social media comments, it's all about the lack of creativity. Megan, thanks for reporting.

Speaker 10 Yeah, my pleasure.

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Speaker 1 The Trump administration is turning its eye on a long-running DEI program that may be one of Washington's most corrupt.

Speaker 2 The federal government awards a percentage of contracts based on the company's owners being, quote, socially disadvantaged, but they may not even be the ones doing the work.

Speaker 2 Daily Wire Investigative Reporter Luke Roziak joins us to discuss. Hey, Luke.
So you've been digging into this. What exactly is going on here?

Speaker 14 Hey, John.

Speaker 14 So this is a program called A-Day Contracting or Set-Aside Contracting, where certain contracts, which could be tens of millions of dollars, are either given to one company with no competition outright or limited so that only, quote, disadvantaged companies are eligible to bid on them.

Speaker 14 And so basically racial minorities and also women-owned companies. So right off the bat, when you're not competing for contracts, you're not getting the best price or the most qualified company.

Speaker 2 So this lessens competition and potentially quality of the work that's produced.

Speaker 14 Exactly. In fact, I'd argue that a lot of the poor performance we see in the federal government, like websites that seem like they're out of the 1990s, is because of this.

Speaker 14 This has been the way that things worked in Washington for decades. Everybody kind of gets their piece.

Speaker 14 Disabled veterans, which veterans like, Alaska Native corporations, which shores up support from Republican lawmakers from that state, and then the big non-minority-owned companies who wind up actually doing a lot of the work as subcontractors or like 49% owners.

Speaker 14 So, James O'Keefe had a great expose last month, you might have seen, where an official from one such company called ATI Government Solutions seemed to admit to just that.

Speaker 15 So the new contract is basically close to 100 million.

Speaker 15 What's the percentage that ATI will retain from that 100 million?

Speaker 15 And you pay these like accentures to do the job. And so it's really minimal work.

Speaker 15 Yes. And honestly, that's

Speaker 15 really in reality that's happening.

Speaker 14 So this is a company that gets contracts because it's owned by Native Americans in part.

Speaker 14 But, of course, the guy we just heard speaking, well, he's the wrong kind of Indian. If you look at ATI's website, all the executives actually seem to be white.

Speaker 14 The website is almost entirely focused on selling the idea that it's easier for government officials to just skip the annoying parts of their job, running a competition to find the best company to do something.

Speaker 14 And also, it's good for big companies because they can have a shortcut to getting these big contracts by working with or partnering with this Indian company, which basically has an automatic in because of its part ownership.

Speaker 2 All right, so the Verrain is sort of a perfect little loop here where everyone seems to benefit. So what are officials saying about this?

Speaker 14 So Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration, said there's a full review of the ADA program underway and that it's already found institutionalized abuse to the tune of billions of dollars.

Speaker 14 She said that ATI's CEO, a guy named Firmage Crutchfield, has a network of seven different companies, all of which has been suspended from receiving new contracts, and she says their names have been provided to law enforcement.

Speaker 14 Senator Joni Ernst, who's chair of the Senate Small Business Committee, said the Biden administration tripled the goal for minority set-asides from 5 to 15%

Speaker 14 and did little to make sure those companies were actually doing the work instead of serving as what they call pass-throughs.

Speaker 14 Ernst said, quote, small businesses' contracting programs were never intended to function as welfare systems for favored classes or give no-bid contracts to do-nothing companies.

Speaker 14 Over the decades, penalties against rule breakers have not been swiftly and resolutely imposed.

Speaker 14 I will say, I've been documenting these pass-through schemes and these problems with minority contractors for more than a decade, and they continued to go on even in the first Trump administration.

Speaker 14 In my opinion, there wasn't much deterrence.

Speaker 14 Now, the Trump administration is also rewriting the federal acquisition regulations, which is a big deal, even though it's kind of wonky inside Washington stuff.

Speaker 14 But so far, I haven't seen anything in those rewrites that would abolish this category outright.

Speaker 2 Well, 5 to 15 percent of all federal contracting dollars is a big number. So, I'm glad they're at least taking a look at fraud.
Luke, thanks so much for digging into this and coming on anytime.

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We'll be back later this evening with more news you need to know.

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