Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) is working with the chairs of three House committees to craft a Republican health plan as the government shutdown nears the one-month mark and Democrats demand action on expiring ObamaCare subsidies.
“Republicans have been working on a solution to health care for years,” Johnson said in a news conference Monday when asked about the looming “healthcare cliff.”
He held up a copy of one political framework developed when he was chairman of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2020, claiming that “these ideas have been on paper for a long time.”
The chairs of the House committees involved in the health care plans would be Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.), Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), and Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg (R-Mich.).
Republicans have come under intense pressure from Democrats on the issue of health care, and there are signs that some in the Republican Party see this as a frail point ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Expanded subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are set to expire at the end of the year, and millions of Americans are receiving notices in the mail about sharply rising premiums.
Prominent Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), have sounded the alarm about the impact of rising insurance premiums that come after Republicans passed cuts to Medicaid funding as part of their tax and spending reconciliation bill.
But Republicans say they won’t negotiate the ACA subsidies until Democrats vote to reopen the government — and they never voted for the expiring subsidy expansions signed into law under former President Biden.
Johnson said lawmakers will always negotiate phasing out subsidies before the end of the year, but expressed opposition to phasing out subsidies.
“The ObamaCare subsidy expiring at the end of the year is a serious problem,” Johnson said. “If you look at it objectively, you know it’s subsidizing bad policy. We’re throwing good money into a bad, broken system, and that’s why real reform is needed.”
Johnson said it’s not appropriate to approach health subsidies as a plain stopgap solution to government funding, “because it’s very complicated to fix.”
“But Republicans have a long list of ideas. Leader Scalise has worked with the chairs of our three judicial committees – getting to the heart of it, articulating all of it, taking the best ideas we’ve had in years, putting them on paper and putting them into action,” Johnson said.
“But we know we have to deal with the Democrats. Why? Because many of them have said they want to move us to a single-payer system,” Johnson said. “You love socialism, my friends.”
Republicans in recent days have floated ideas such as expanding health savings accounts and touted a provision to reimburse private health insurance cost-sharing discounts in the House version of the tax-and-spending megabill, but that was removed from the final version in the Senate.
