President Donald Trump and congressional leaders from both parties exited a high-stakes negotiation meeting Monday afternoon with little optimism a deal could be struck before the end of the month to avoid a government shutdown.
“I think we’re heading to a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing,” Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters after the meeting. “I hope they change their mind, but we’re going to see.”
Healthcare issues have been and continue to be a sticking point of the negotiations, with Democrats demanding an extension of Affordable Care Act (ACA) enhanced premiums set to run dry at the end of the year as well as protections against White House recissions of appropriated funding. Republicans have floated a seven-week stopgap bill to keep the government running, telling their colleagues across the aisle that the ACA subsidies can wait until later in the year.
Democrat leaders, however, say the issue needs to be addressed immediately as punting an ACA subsidy extension past Sept. 30 would lead insurers to notify potential enrollees of higher premiums ahead of the open enrollment season, in which notices begin circulating in October. They also pointed to promises from Republicans to address healthcare during an earlier funding faceoff earlier this year, which didn’t materialize.
“On Oct. 1 they get these notices, and many of them by November have to make a decision whether to change their healthcare,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told reporters after the meeting. “…You can’t wait till January. You have to do that now.”
On potential progress, Schumer told reporters that Trump appeared more receptive to the issue than congressional Republican leaders, particularly when Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also of New York, outlined multiplicative increases in premiums some enrollees would face.
“There was a real division,” Schumer said, “because when we talked to the president about the problems in healthcare, … he was not aware that … tens of millions of Americans would pay huge increases in their healthcare bills because of the ACA [enhanced premiums] expiring in December. He was not aware that the real effect of that starts Oct. 1, not Dec. 31.”
“Now we know why [congressional Republicans] didn’t want him to meet with us,” Schumer said.
Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louis., pushed back on Democrats’ claims that they had been excluded from negotiations until Monday. Vance, speaking to press, said their opening demand of “hundreds of billions of dollars to illegal aliens for their healthcare while Americans are struggling to pay for their healthcare” was an “absurd” nonstarter that made any discussions impossible. Of note, undocumented immigrants are unable to sign up for federally funded health coverage, which would not change under Democrats’ proposals.
They asserted that Republicans are open to the broader task of legislating bipartisan healthcare fixes, but not while a shutdown looms.
“Every single thing that they accuse about being broken about American healthcare is policy Democrats have supported in the past decade,” Vance said. “So if they want to talk about how to fix American healthcare policy, let’s do it. The speaker would love to do it, the Senate majority leader would love to do it. Let’s work on it together, but lets do it in the context of an open government that’s providing essential services to the American people. That’s all that we’re proposing to do, and the fact that they refuse to do that shows how unreasonable their position is.”
Other funding streams for hospitals and regulatory waivers around telehealth and hospital-at-home programs are also set to lapse should no deal be made by Tuesday night.