Congress flails on health care as Obamacare deadline looms

By Sarah Ferris, CNN

(CNN) — Congress is almost out of time to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies that would avert skyrocketing health care premiums for tens of millions of Americans next year.

And with GOP leaders far from a consensus among their members, lawmakers in both parties are increasingly worried that those funds will actually lapse — thrusting the country into an affordability crisis in a critical midterm election year.

“There is a deadline. So people need to get their head out of their ass and get to work,” GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told reporters on Thursday, after he and roughly 30 other centrists from both parties introduced their own ideas to keep the subsidies flowing, but with major overhauls to the program.

House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed on Thursday that he will put forward his party’s plan next week. But many of his own members aren’t clear what will be included, privately complaining that his leadership team has waited far too long and now has little chance of staving off the health care cliff before December 31. Few members expect the House GOP’s plan to include any version of extending those subsidies, which will result in spiking costs for millions of Americans.

“We’re trying to get consensus on it. It’s a complicated matter. Lots of opinions on it,” Johnson told reporters Thursday, summing up where talks were in the increasingly unruly House GOP conference. He said he hopes to have a plan by early next week.

Top Democrats, meanwhile, are so irate at the GOP’s inaction that they’re digging in on their partisan push that’s been broadly rejected by Republicans. That plan – three more years of Obamacare subsidies with no changes – will get a Senate vote next week under a previous agreement with Senate GOP leaders, but it stands no chance of succeeding.

Caught in the middle are dozens of exasperated moderates from both parties, who have had frantic meetings with Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and White House officials in recent days about their concerns, according to multiple people familiar with those discussions. (The White House has been largely silent on the issue, after shelving its own plan last week, due to pushback from some Hill Republicans.)

It all amounts to an increasingly nasty fight in Congress this month, with no clear solution. There are plenty of agitated centrists who are frustrated at their own leaders for inaction — but Johnson and his leadership team also have few options given the ultra-narrow margins in the House and the fierce anti-Obamacare mood among their conservative flank.

In recent days, centrist Republicans like Lawler and Reps. Jen Kiggans of Virginia and Kevin Kiley of California, who are some of the House GOP’s most endangered members, have been aggressively urging Johnson to come up with a plan. Many of them joined together with Democrats on Thursday to put forward their own tenets of a plan, which demands a vote to extend the subsidies – with big changes such as income caps – by December 18.

But that centrist group has run into a different political headache: Abortion politics. The push has stalled, for now, until members can find a way to neutralize the issue of the so-called Hyde amendment, which bars federal dollars for abortion. The issue has come up in multiple meetings with GOP leaders and committee chairs, two people familiar with the talks said.

“I think all of us here today are sending a very clear message. Doing nothing is not an option,” Kiley said Thursday, as part of the group of House moderates who are pushing for leadership to start shopping around their framework as a path forward. “This has not exactly been the finest hour for the House of Representatives.”

Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have thwacked Republican leaders for failing to put forward a plan while doing little to find a bipartisan path forward.

“They have no unity, they have no consensus. They don’t even have concepts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “It’s amazing. They have nothing. It’s the most major issue facing the American people and they can’t get their act together.”

Schumer delivered his attacks on the GOP as he formally announced the Democrats’ health care plan: A three-year extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that even GOP moderates have rejected. Schumer and Democrats will get this vote next Thursday as part of a deal made between Senate Majority Leader John Thune and a small bloc of centrist Democrats to reopen the government last month.

But GOP leaders don’t expect many, if any, of their own senators to embrace the plan.

“This isn’t a serious offer,” said Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming. “This is not an offer that they’re trying to get Republican buy-in at all.”

Schumer, however, was visibly irritated when pressed by reporters why Democrats were pushing a vote that stands no chance of becoming law.

“It is not a non-starter. Thirteen votes could solve the problem,” Schumer said, raising his voice, as he hammered Republicans for being unwilling to talk seriously, even as part of behind-the-scenes bipartisan health care talks that resulted from the shutdown-ending deal last month. “The fault is theirs, not with us.”

Republicans in the Senate haven’t yet decided whether they will offer their own plan alongside the Democratic vote.

“It’s still a work in progress,” Thune told reporters when asked whether the GOP would offer its own vote next week.

“We’re talking about different alternatives to actually focus on the problems of Obamacare, to get people more involved,” Barrasso said, pointing to Trump’s past support for a plan to redistribute subsidies money to American consumers, rather than insurance companies. He would not, however, say whether GOP leaders would attempt to write a special filibuster-proof party-line bill to muscle through their own health care plan next year.

“We’re going to have talks, discussing things with our members,” Barrasso said, when asked about the possibility of pushing another reconciliation bill in 2026.

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