John McCain killing the GOP’s Obamacare repeal bill in 2017.
Photo: C-SPAN/Youtube
From the very beginning of the current federal government shutdown, the big question has been whether Democrats can convince Republicans to give them the trophy of an extension of soon-to-expire Obamacare premium subsidies that were enacted in 2021. Democratic optimism on this subject has been based on the belief that Republicans up for reelection next year really don’t want to get blamed for the huge spike in health-insurance premiums that would hit upward of 20 million mostly middle-class Americans if the subsidies expire (with the first flare-up occurring when open enrollment for Obamacare plans begins on November 1). And indeed, Punchbowl News’s soundings of the U.S. House indicate there are “somewhere between 20% and 30% of GOP lawmakers” who are “open to extending” the subsidies.
But Punchbowl’s reporting also shows why bringing along the the rest of the GOP caucus (which aside from the ever-erratic Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t going to split the party wide open over this issue) will be extremely difficult. An interview with the No. 2 House Republican, Steve Scalise, served as a reminder that the majority of Republicans don’t just hate the expanded subsidies enacted in 2021, but Obamacare itself, and will be loathe to lift a finger to make it work better:
I know they’re [Democrats] trying to dump the problems of Obamacare off on everybody, other than the people that actually passed and voted for Obamacare. Those high premiums are a result of Democrat policies. If they really wanted to work with us on lower premiums, there are a lot of bipartisan ideas that you could come to the table and bring and do, and they’ve got to stop fighting the things that have been proven to work, as well.”
Those bipartisan ideas that Scalise is referring to include association health plans, which allow employers to join together to buy insurance plans, plus health savings accounts.
Long story short, the “bipartisan ideas” Scalise is touting are the same old tired proposals Republicans have been pushing for more than a decade that would make it easier for insurance companies to cherrypick young and healthy people while leaving older and sicker people a few ways to get really crappy insurance at terrible rates. Yes, Obamacare has gone from being a risky experiment that people happy with their health insurance feared to becoming a generally accepted and even popular way for government to make health care widely available and affordable. But many, perhaps most, Republicans haven’t changed their minds at all. Given half a chance, they’d try again to repeal Obamacare whether or not they had any workable replacement (pro tip: they still don’t!) to offer.
So very much has happened in the past decade that it’s easy to forget that most middle-aged Republican lawmakers cut their political teeth in the Tea Party era when Obamacare was the Great White Whale for conservatives wrathful about big and intrusive government. The big federal government shutdown of that period, in 2013, was precisely over GOP efforts to blow up Obamacare by defunding its operations. It failed. So when Donald Trump took office with a Republican trifecta in 2017, the very first order of business was Trump 1.0’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a budget package whose central feature was repealing Obamacare. That too, failed, which probably made a deep impression on Trump. He quickly turned his attentions to a tax cut and hasn’t tried to do a whole lot on the health-care-policy front since then, other than this year’s Medicaid cuts, which Republicans have denied are cuts at all.
Trump’s bad experience with Obamacare repeal efforts is the big reason why Democrats think the president himself may impose an Obamacare subsidy deal that enables everyone to reopen the federal government. Nobody doubts his power to do so if he chooses. But no one should doubt that the bulk of Republicans will hate this like sin and won’t accommodate it on their own.
