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Russian (RU) WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives on Thursday passed a three-year extension of expanded Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies that had lapsed at the beginning of the year in a rebuke to House GOP leaders and President Donald Trump.
The bill passed 230 to 196, with 17 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.
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It’s dead on arrival in the Senate, however, where Republicans are insisting on reforms to the program as well as additional restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion.
A group of bipartisan senators is working on a compromise measure that would extend the subsidies for two years, with much higher income limits on who can qualify, and require minimum premium payments.
But it is the abortion issue that is seen as the biggest hang-up. Trump this week urged Republicans to be “more flexible” on the matter, sparking sharp backlash from social conservatives in and out of Congress.
“I certainly understand where the president’s coming from, but I’m unapologetically pro-life,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) told HuffPost.
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Thursday’s bipartisan House vote resulted from four Republicans signing on to a Democratic “discharge petition,” a legislative tool that allows lawmakers to circumvent the majority party’s leadership team, which normally controls action on the House floor. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) resisted Democratic demands for a vote on the subsidies during a six-week government shutdown last fall.
While the shutdown utterly failed to “save health care,” as Democrats had hoped, it succeeded in raising awareness that more than 20 million people would see their health insurance premium costs increase by 100% or more this year. Republicans insisted they had a plan, but the episode showed they did not.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), one of the moderate House Republicans who signed the discharge petition, said he thinks of Thursday’s vote as a way to spur negotiations.
“My objective in signing the discharge and voting for this legislation is to give the senators a vehicle by which to pass a bipartisan compromise,” Lawler told HuffPost.
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Lawler and several other moderate House Republicans last year worked on bills that would extend the subsidies for less than three years, with income limits and other changes designed to reduce the cost of the extension. The compromise efforts went nowhere, as Democratic leaders insisted on a clean three-year extension of the subsidy enhancements, which were originally created on a temporary basis in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate published Tuesday that the House bill would cost $80 billion and increase the number of people with health insurance by about 100,000 this year, 3 million next year, and 4.0 million in 2028.
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