This.
I.e.:
"are we going to get beat up because [next year’s premium increases will be] double-digit or are we just going to have to pull out of the program?”
The plan of course is the latter. If one of your pals is still trying to trick people into believing that the Left's path to put America onto single payer medicine is really a Republican plot to transfer wealth to insurance companies, the temporary and decreasing subsidy to these rich corporations is obviously merely about getting an economically unviable, AKA socialist, scheme entrenched. This is a multi-step plan of course and that's only the first. All you have to do is understand the Left and then look ahead.
And while that's part of the long view on this particular issue, there's also the tall view on issues in general:
It’s the people who aren’t eligible for large subsidies—those who aren’t poor enough—who will gradually be squeezed out of affordable options.
To borrow from the Left a certain way of phrasing something, but instead being dead serious about it, what they're *overall* engaging in is a war on the middle class. (Naturally, as follows.)
Of the rich, those on the Left and Right are already decided and probably can't be swayed. The former believe in collectivism and the latter individualism, but either way their futures are secure, so the latter are written off as small unattainable minority.
The poor is already decided, and they're taken for granted as unloseable. Like the Blacks; fucking 90-some percent voting D, every time. They're the dumbest demographic around. What have the D's really accomplished for them. Jack shit. But I digress. All I can say is that they went from involutary slavery to voluntary slavery. How dumb is that.
But the middle classes of America have historically been independent-minded and wanting to be like the rich, and believing in the American Dream that they had a chance at it. So what ultimately the Left wants/needs, is to put the squeeze on the middle classes, drive them into the lowers classes and the lower class mindset, by stagnating the economy and devaluing their earnings and making things increasingly unaffordable, i.e. unattainable on their own. I.e. get them to believe the message they've told the Blacks, that they can't make it on their own. (The infamous "you didn't build that" is along this line.)