Johnson’s boss says GOP is working on GOP health care plan amid shutdown
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) is working with the chairs of three House committees to put together a GOP health care plan as the government shutdown approaches one month and Democrats demand action on the end of ObamaCare subsidies, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Monday.
“Republicans have been working on health care reform, and we’ve been doing it for years,” Johnson said at a news conference Monday when asked about the coming “health care cliff.”
He held up a copy of the policy framework developed while he was chairman of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2020, stressing that “these ideas have been on paper for a long time.”
The chairs of the House committees with jurisdiction involved in the health care plans will 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 health care issue, and there have been signs that some in the GOP view it as a weakness ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act are set to expire at the end of the year, and millions of Americans are receiving notices in the mail about a sharp rise in insurance premiums.
Prominent GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), have sounded the alarm about the effects of higher insurance prices, which come after Republicans passed funding cuts to Medicaid as part of the tax and spending reconciliation bill.
However, Republicans say they will not negotiate support for the Affordable Care Act until Democrats vote to reopen the government — and they never voted for expiring support improvements that were signed into law under former President Biden.
Johnson said expiring subsidies will always be something lawmakers negotiate before the end of the year, but he expressed opposition to those expiring subsidies.
“Supporting ObamaCare, which expires at the end of the year, is a serious problem,” Johnson said. “If you look at it objectively, you’ll know that he supports bad policies. We’re throwing good money at a system that’s bad and broken, and so it needs real reforms.”
Johnson said it was not appropriate to address health care subsidies with a simple temporary government funding measure “because it is too complicated to fix.”
“But Republicans have a long list of ideas,” Johnson said. “Leader Scalise has been working with the chairs of our three Judiciary committees — laying out all of that, formulating all of that, taking the best ideas that we’ve had in years, to put them on paper and make them work.”
“But we know we will have to engage in an armed struggle with the Democrats,” Johnson said. “Why? Because many of them insist on bringing us to a single-payer system.” “They love socialism, my friends.”
Republicans in recent days have floated ideas such as expanding health savings accounts and touted a provision in the House version of the massive tax and spending bill on reimbursement for cost-sharing cuts for private health plans, but it was stripped from the final version in the Senate.
