Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. The author of four books, his new study of the Ken Curtis administration is due next year. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

Once again, we have a federal government shutdown that may run for weeks. Although the Senate is in town, the House won’t return until Oct. 14, two months after Speaker Mike Johnson abruptly adjourned to avoid a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein files.

We know the drill: one party or the other, earlier Republicans, lately Democrats, deny the necessary votes to keep things running. Many federal employees are furloughed while others work without pay, with public services disrupted the longer shutdowns continue.

Though there have been, officially, 21 previous shutdowns, starting in 1976 with the Ford administration, only three have been truly consequential, in 1995, 2013 and 2018.

The first was orchestrated by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who engineered a full takeover of Congress in 1994 by running on a faux-populist platform called the “Contract with America” that achieved little but marked a political milestone. For the first time in 40 years, Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.

But Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president, and though Gingrich forced him to “blink” after an initial five-day pause, he threw in the towel after the second, 21-day shutdown that lasted over the Christmas-New Year’s holidays.

In 2013, Republican House leaders shut down things again, demanding defunding of “Obamacare,” the Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010 but only then being implemented. The rollout proceeded when Republicans gave up after 16 days.

Finally, late in 2018, the first-term Donald Trump demanded funding to finish his “border wall” with Mexico, after promising in his 2016 campaign he would build the wall and Mexico would pay for it. Republicans had just lost the House, with Nancy Pelosi about to become speaker, so Trump made a last-ditch gamble he could force Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to blink, and failed.

In all three shutdowns, public opinion swung sharply against Republicans, who were held responsible — yet they didn’t pay for it at the ballot box. Since Speaker Gingrich’s exercise in obstructionism, Republicans have controlled the House, Senate or the presidency for all but four years: the first Congresses under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, whose majorities were then swept away.

What has happened is that Americans’ faith in government and estimation of its competence have gone down and down. When any new initiative is needed, government looks to the private sector to carry it out and often do the planning.

In 2003, under George W. Bush and a Republican Congress, we essentially privatized Medicare, previously our sole health care program with universal access that the government controlled and we paid for through taxes.

The highly touted prescription drug plan, Part D, was enacted with pharmaceutical companies welcome to charge whatever they pleased. Soaring prices, anyone? Joe Biden finally obtained authorization to negotiate prices on a few drugs each year — something every other major country has always done for every prescription.

Even worse, Part C was established to allow giant for-profit health insurers to sell policies directly to seniors, the Advantage Plans. They’re heavily subsidized by taxpayers — us — and carry lower premiums than comparable “traditional” Medicare plans with supplemental “Medigap” policies, also sold privately. Diminishing numbers of seniors remain traditional because it costs more.

For our trouble, we have health insurers over which we have no control — unlike banking, insurance is regulated only by states — and consolidated hospitals whose priorities are skewed toward producing revenue rather that serving local communities. One might say it is a nightmare.

So although Republicans failed in their attempt to repeal Obamacare in 2017, or to defund it in 2013, they have created a privatized Medicare system in which the provision of universal health care at regulated rates seems impossible, and trust in government sinks still further.

Will the current shutdown produce more of the same? Perhaps not.

For the first time, Republicans are in control of Congress and the White House, and it’s difficult to blame the minority party as the shutdown drags on, though Trump has certainly tried. Democrats seem united on a single point: restoration of enhanced Obamacare subsidies enacted under Biden.

Simply put, if subsidies are not restored, a lot of Americans will lose health insurance because they can no longer afford it. More than a decade into the Affordable Care Act era, that will sting. It may not be like cutting Social Security benefits — even Ronald Reagan at his peak couldn’t do that — but it could force a reckoning.

Congressional Republicans, who’ve found nothing the president does that they won’t go along with, may be forced to put some daylight between themselves and the White House. Perhaps Democrats could also ask for repeal of Part C.