Speaker Mike Johnson sat down with CNN's Jake Tapper this Monday following the Democrats' cave on the government shutdown and immediately threw cold water on the notion that we'll ever see a vote on extending the ACA tax subsidies in the House:
“The problem is when you’re subsidizing insurance companies, they just jack the rates up even higher,” Johnson said. “I mean, we’ve been seeing this over and over and over. So the solution is to get …at the root causes.”
Johnson said House Republicans have “a lot of ideas that we’d like to bring back to the table, because that will actually solve the problem and not just subsidize insurance companies.”
Tapper asked, “So you’re not committing to bringing up a bill that deals with the Obamacare subsidies before they expire?”
“I’m not committing to it or not committing to it!” Johnson said. “What I’m saying is that we do a deliberative process. That’s the way this always works, and we have to have time to do that. And we will in a bipartisan fashion.”
Tapper also allowed Johnson to pretend they've tried to fix our broken health care system rather than make it worse with their "big beautiful bill" that passed earlier this year and continue to tell the lie they keep repeating that they've supposedly got tons of stuff in the works to make health insurance "affordable" other than allowing insurance to sell high deductible plans that don't cover anything.
Here's the full exchange above with Tapper and Johnson:
TAPPER: The Senate is setting a date for a Senate vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year. You have not committed to a separate House vote on the issue. Thirteen of your most vulnerable members, as you know, wrote a letter to you saying that after the shutdown, "We should immediately turn our focus to the growing crisis of health care affordability and the looming expiration of the Enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits. While we did not create this crisis, we now have both the responsibility and the opportunity to address it."
That's 13 members. Are you going to listen to them?
JOHNSON: Yeah, I've been in contact with those members and all of our members throughout the entire ordeal that we've been going through. This is a very important point. We were always open to sitting down to negotiate and talk through how to reduce health care costs. It's a crisis for the American people. The cost have skyrocketed. It's the Democrats who put us into this scenario. Remember, they're the ones that created the ACA. We call it the Unaffordable Care Act. That's exactly what's been yielded. Since 2010, since they put it into law premiums have skyrocketed, some estimates 60% overall, and they're continuing to go up.
TAPPER: Well, premiums were skyrocketing before Obamacare, too.
JOHNSON: Not at this pace. And the problem is now it's becoming completely unaffordable for more and more people. The Democrat solution is to subsidize the broken system. We would like to go in and look at the root causes of why those costs are so high.
And we've been doing that. It's not just talking points. We have had laws signed into law, this Congress that had begun to chip away at that. There's a lot more yet to do, we've got to build consensus between the parties that should be bipartisan. We're looking forward to that.
TAPPER: That's a long-term issue, though, what you're talking about. You're not going to be able to solve this issue of skyrocketing premiums, not just in Obamacare, for everything. Well... Premiums are going up in Obamacare, yes. They're also going up for people not in Obamacare, like me and you.
JOHNSON: Well, there are short-term solutions and longer-term solutions.
TAPPER:You're right. It's very complicated. But on the short-term issue of the people with the subsidies, and that's going to expire at the end of the year, will you have a vote on the issue as your 13 Republicans, frontline Republicans, people that are, you're the speaker because of them.
JOHNSON: Yes.
TAPPER: They're in districts that are vulnerable.
JOHNSON: Sure.
TAPPER: Will you have a vote so they can vote?
JOHNSON: The very people that you were citing in the letter believe we have to have real reform. So what I'm committed to and I have all along, this has never changed, is a deliberative process that we do in the House. We have a a very small margin, majorities, whomever has the majority now in this era is going to have a small margin, so it requires the involvement of lot of members.
See, the problem that I had with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries is that Leader Schumer was insisting that I go into a back room, Leader Thune and I go into a back room with he and Jeffries and do a four corners agreement to fix this. It's not possible. It was never appropriate to do that on a short term funding measure. We needed the month of October, November, December to work through this. And ironically, because of his shenanigans, they've now taken all that time off the clock. So we have a lot more important work to do in a shorter time period.
TAPPER: Congressman Don Bacon, who's retiring of Nebraska, he's been working with Congressman Tom Souzzi, a moderate Democrat from New York. About this exact issue, about reforms on these subsidies, means testing, having the payments directly go to the insurance companies instead of to the businesses than the insurance companies. Is that something you're willing to let come up for a vote?
JOHNSON: That's one of many ideas that are on the table. The problem is when you're subsidizing insurance companies, they just jack the rates up even higher. I we've been seeing this over and over and over. So the solution is to get, again, to get at the root causes. I'll give you an example. In the big, beautiful bill, the Working Families Tax Cut, we had the Medicaid reforms. So as we've discussed many times, what we did was we went in to eliminate the fraud, waste, and abuse and drive down the cost. T
he CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, evaluated that and said, you know what, that's right, it will achieve that. It'll save $185 billion for taxpayers because you got ineligible enrollees off the system.
We need to do that same thing across the board through healthcare. We tried that in the big, beautiful bill when it went over to the Senate and the House version. We included a cost sharing reduction program that would have reduced premiums 12.7% overall on average nationwide. The Democrats fought in the Senate to take it out of the bill.
So, there are a lot of ideas that we'd like to bring back to the table because that will actually solve the problem and not just subsidize insurance costs.
TAPPER: So you're not committing to bringing up a bill that deals with the Obamacare subsidies before they expire?
JOHNSON: I'm not committing to it or not committing to it. What I'm saying is that we do a deliberative process. That's the way this always works and we have to have time to do that and we will in a bipartisan fashion.
TAPPER: If something passes the Senate, it would only pass on a bipartisan basis. Would you bring it up?
JOHNSON: Well, the bill that's going to pass...
TAPPER: To extend the subsidies, that later vote.
JOHNSON: I can't commit to anything that hasn't even passed through the Senate yet. I mean, I've never done that. I'm very consistent. I've been Speaker for over two years, and one of the reasons I've held the gavel is because I don't go out and predetermine outcomes. It's a member-driven uh institution as it should be, and I'm really insistent about that. We've to get back to regular order, and that's what we're doing here.
