Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) is working with the chairs of three House committees to compile a Republican health care plan as the government shutdown nears the one-month mark and Democrats demand action on expiring ObamaCare subsidies.
“Republicans have been working on a fix for health care, we’ve been doing this for years,” Johnson said in a press conference on Monday when asked about the coming “health care cliff.”
He held up a copy of a policy framework developed when he was chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2020, asserting that “these ideas have been on paper for a long time.”
The heads of those House committees of jurisdiction involved in the health care plans would be Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), and Education and Workforce Chair Tim Walberg (R-Mich.).
Republicans have come under intense pressure from Democrats on the issue of health care, and there have been signs that some in the GOP see it as a vulnerability ahead of next year’s midterms. Enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are set to expire at the end of the year, and millions of Americans are receiving notifications in the mail about sharply rising premiums.
Prominent GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), have sounded the alarm about the effects of rising insurance rates, which come after Republicans passed funding cuts to Medicaid as part of their tax and spending reconciliation bill.
Republicans, however, say they will not negotiate on the ACA subsidies until Democrats vote to reopen the government — and they have never voted for the expiring subsidy enhancements signed into law under former President Biden.
Johnson has said that the subsidy expiration was always going to be something that lawmakers negotiate before the end of the year, but he voiced his opposition to those expiring subsidies.
“The expiring ObamaCare subsidy at the end of the year is a serious problem,” Johnson said. “If you look at it objectively, you know that it is subsidizing bad policy. We’re throwing good money at a bad, broken system, and so it needs real reforms.”
Johnson said it is not appropriate to address the health care subsidies on a simple stopgap government funding measure “because it’s very complicated to fix.”
“But Republicans have a long list of ideas. Leader Scalise has been working with the chairmen of our three committees of jurisdiction — putting all of that, formulating all that, grabbing the best ideas that we’ve had for years, to put it on paper and make it work,” Johnson said.
“But we know we’re going to have to arm wrestle with Democrats. Why? Because many of them are avowed to get us to a single-payer system,” Johnson said. “They do love socialism, my friends.”
Republicans in recent days have brought up ideas like expanding health savings accounts, and they flaunted a provision in the House version of the tax-and-spending megabill on cost-sharing reduction reimbursements to private health plans, but it was stripped from the final version in the Senate.