Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions.
As millions of Americans are bracing to see their health insurance premiums more than double due to Republicans' refusal to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits, GOP lawmakers insisted this week that they will fix health care in the United States. Just trust them!
Never mind that Republicans for the past 15 years have failed to come up with a health care plan that Americans want or one that improves on the ACA, also known as Obamacare. Republicans are insisting that if they're given just a little more time they will fix the whole health care system.
"We're gonna have a vote before the end of the year for sure, and then we're going to continue to do improvements along the way. In the first quarter, second quarter, there's a lot to fix in health care, we've all acknowledged that," House Speaker Mike Johnson told Punchbowl News on Tuesday.
At a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, House Republicans presented 10 possible ideas, none of which included extending the enhanced ACA tax credits to prevent the coming premium increases.
Yet Republicans left the meeting no closer to an agreement on how to move forward as the clock ticks down for Americans who rely on those credits to stay insured.
“The consensus is we need to come up with something,” Rep. Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, said.
Senate Republicans, meanwhile, voted on a plan on Thursday that would give low-income Americans $1,000 to put in health savings accounts. And the proposal failed, receiving fewer than the 60 votes it needed to avoid a filibuster.
Yet, even if it had passed, it wouldn’t have been sufficient to help all of the millions of Americans who are about to be hit with massive premium increases.
"Under the Senate Republican ACA plan, premium payments would still more than double next year. Healthy people could be better off in a high deductible plan with a health savings account. People who are sick would face big premium increases or a deductible they can't afford," Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, wrote in a post on X.
To the mainstream media's credit, reporters grilled Republicans on why, after more than a decade and a half of bitching about the perils of Obamacare, they still have no plan to replace it.
But their answers were predictably cowardly.
"In the short term, you know, we're still wrestling with how to deal with this," Republican Sen. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania told Fox News when asked what Republicans would tell Americans who want to know what the GOP's plan is. "But I'm of the opinion that we should try to find a way to make sure that working families, those that are living paycheck to paycheck, get incremental dollars in their pocket as these subsidies roll off."
"I'm not sure what we can say," Sen. Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, told CNN's Kaitlan Collins after she asked why the GOP still has no concrete proposal.
Ultimately, Republicans can complain about the ACA and claim they will make health care more affordable for only so long. There will come a point where Americans will be actively hurt by the GOP's disarray and refusal to pass a palatable health care law that ensures they will get the care they need and not go bankrupt in the process.
And Republicans will not like the result of their health care failures next November, when voters will get the chance to make their displeasure known at the ballot box.
“We've got to solve it,” retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told CNN. “Or going into next year, we will own a problem that [Democrats] created.”
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
UPDATE (Karoli) : The House has chosen not to vote on extending the subsidies. Mike Johnson says affordable healthcare "was just not to be." They own it now. Every last death is on them. They claimed they had to offset the subsidies with other healthcare cuts (bullshit), so they couldn't find a way through for the subsidies. Since they cut $1 trillion out of Medicaid, I'm sure they had a credit there. They just don't want to do it. This is how they kill the ACA. Death by 1000 cuts to subsidies. I hope every one of them rots in hell forever.
