Healthcare Subsidies Aren’t In The Deal To Reopen The Government. What Is?

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Speaker 5 Tales from the Crypt with Domenico.

Speaker 4 Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon.

Speaker 3 I cover politics. I'm Deirdrew Walsh.
I cover Congress.

Speaker 5 And I'm Domenico Montanero, senior political editor and correspondent.

Speaker 4 And today on the show, the government shutdown is over, but what does it all mean?

Speaker 4 What's in that deal that Congress just passed, and what comes next for those health care subsidies that Democrats said they were fighting for? Dear Dre, I'm going to start with you.

Speaker 4 What is in this deal?

Speaker 3 So they passed a bill last night that funds most government agencies through January 30th.

Speaker 3 There were some full-year funding bills, three that Congress actually had negotiated over the last few months included as part of this package.

Speaker 3 That means that the Veterans Administration, programs like SNAP, the Food Assistance will have a full fiscal year's worth of funding.

Speaker 3 It also included a provision to reverse the layoffs that the Trump administration imposed over the course of the shutdown.

Speaker 3 And then there's this other provision that sort of got slipped in at the last minute by Senate Republicans that caused a little bit of a hiccup in the vote last night, but it ended up passing the House.

Speaker 3 So this provision was added that would allow Senate Republicans who had their phone records records seized without their knowledge during Jack Smith, the special prosecutor's investigation of January 6th, to sue the government and essentially get a $500,000 settlement plus any legal fees.

Speaker 4 So just to be clear, did this have anything to do with the larger issues in question?

Speaker 3 No, and what happens with these like must-pass bills is little things get slipped on that could never pass on their own. There was no way this was going to pass as a standalone bill.

Speaker 3 This was crafted carefully and it has a a retroactive date in it, which makes it very clear who it's designed to help.

Speaker 3 And we know that there are about, I think, eight or nine Republican senators whose phone records were obtained during this investigation.

Speaker 3 Sometimes that happens as part of an investigation, but, you know, they now get taxpayer settlements, essentially, for this. A bunch of House Republicans were like, what is this?

Speaker 3 The House Speaker admitted he didn't even know about it. And now the House is going to vote next week to repeal it.
But I don't know that the Senate will pass it, even if the House does.

Speaker 3 But either way, this is just an example of, you know, sometimes these things get slipped into must-pass fending bills. And this is something that I think has outraged people in both parties.

Speaker 5 So they're actually able to do that now, but it might get repealed next week.

Speaker 3 I think there's a good chance the House will pass a bill to repeal it. But since the Senate approved it, I don't know that the Senate will actually pass the bill.

Speaker 3 And we know already one of these Republican senators, Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, has said he plans to sue. And he doesn't think he should just take a half a million dollar settlement.

Speaker 3 He wants more than that. But this is a completely different debate than what we've been talking about for the 43 days of the government shutdown.

Speaker 3 And it's just a sign of like the dysfunctional Congress. There were two Republicans that voted against the bill last night.

Speaker 3 One Florida Republican, Greg Stuby, said he voted no because of this provision. He called it self-dealing.

Speaker 4 Are House Republicans upset because they were cut out of this, or are they upset because of some larger political calculation or something else? Why are House Republicans angry?

Speaker 3 No, they wanted to pass the bill to fund the government and reopen things. They were angry that they were not consulted, and clearly the Senate was jamming them on this.

Speaker 4 Okay, so this does reopen the government, but there's a lot that Democrats were trying to achieve through this shutdown, and there's a lot that's still up in the air.

Speaker 4 How are Democrats feeling about where things have landed?

Speaker 3 I would say most Democrats on Capitol Hill are still pretty upset and angry over the deal that was crafted.

Speaker 3 Remember, this was a small group of moderate Senate Democrats who decided there was too much pain, too many people weren't getting a food assistance, they were worried about things getting worse, and they wanted an off-ramp.

Speaker 3 They abandoned the Democrats' position of insisting there had to be some action on these expiring health care subsidies and instead settled for a promise of a vote down the line.

Speaker 3 But I would say most House Democrats, and all but six, voted no on this, thought this was a bad deal and that the party should have stayed united to fight against the Trump administration.

Speaker 3 One of them was California Congressman RoConna.

Speaker 6 I think the American people got a lot of hate. 20 million Americans are going to see their premiums skyrocket.
I don't think they like the fact that we didn't fight hard enough.

Speaker 4 I mean, Dominico, enough Democrats did vote, though, to reopen the government. Why did they give in?

Speaker 5 Yeah, a minority, obviously. We saw eight members of the Democratic caucus, you know, cross over to join Republicans to vote for this.

Speaker 5 That includes seven Democrats and Angus King, the independent from Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats.

Speaker 5 Now, I think that's mostly because of this big picture in talking about how much pain can Democrats really feel like American people can absorb and can they absorb that?

Speaker 5 Like, do they feel like people going without SNAP benefits or federal workers not going to work or there being extensive flight delays at airports, that that's something that they want to be part of enabling.

Speaker 5 And I think there were two kinds of conversations going on: one, where you have these moderate Democrats saying, This is too much, it's too far, we don't see an end in sight here, and Republicans don't appear any closer to negotiating after the longest government shutdown in history.

Speaker 5 And then, this political calculation that a lot of Democrats were saying, that, hey, we were winning on this, why suddenly cave on it?

Speaker 5 Well, there's a difference, I think, in how people feel about what their role is, right?

Speaker 5 Like, is it to make sure that millions of people aren't hurt and be able to get those SNAP benefits and all of the rest that we're talking about? Or is it to win on politics?

Speaker 5 And I think that there's always somewhere in between on that.

Speaker 5 And it was particularly jarring for progressives and you know, frankly, Democrats are people left of center across the political spectrum a week after winning a very broad electoral win across the country to see this happen, especially when so many promises have been made to the base over the years and they've just been rolled.

Speaker 4 It was really a tough spot that Democrats were in. Did they get anything out of this?

Speaker 3 Not much.

Speaker 3 I mean, the group that negotiated this deal in the Senate essentially got a pledge from Senate Majority Leader John Thune to hold a vote by mid-December on a health care bill that they will craft.

Speaker 3 It is not a guarantee that anything will pass. It is not a, we're going to negotiate a solution.

Speaker 3 There are a group of Senate Republicans who agree that a lot of their constituents are going to have steep premium increases in their health care costs if Congress doesn't do anything.

Speaker 3 Senate Majority Leader Thune has said that. Whether there's enough to come to the table and broker a deal sort of remains to be seen.
I will say, talk to Senator Jean Shaheen from New Hampshire.

Speaker 3 She was sort of the key Democrat who negotiated this deal directly with Thune.

Speaker 3 I mean, she argued more people in red states rely on these subsidies than more people in blue states, and that Trump, the president, is going to feel pressured to deal with this.

Speaker 3 She didn't have a deal with the president. She has a deal with Thune.
The White House was involved in these talks, so they knew that this vote is going to happen.

Speaker 3 And I think to Domenico's point about sort of the political value of this whole standoff, I think there are a lot of Democrats who voted for the deal and against the deal who do think that what was accomplished is that people now understand Democrats are fighting for these health care subsidies, and that's a political win for them.

Speaker 5 I have to say, they did come out with, I think, a pretty big political win, which was raising the visibility of the issue of health care and health care subsidies.

Speaker 5 It's really not something that people were talking very much about before the shutdown began. You know, it was being talked about in Democratic circles, certainly.

Speaker 5 But Democrats were able able to raise this issue, raise its importance, and it's something that they're going to be able to run on in the 2026 midterm elections, especially if Republicans wind up blocking the extension of subsidies in this promised vote that is supposed to come up next month.

Speaker 4 All right, we're going to take a quick break. We'll have more in just a moment.

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Speaker 4 And we're back. We've been talking about the deal that brought the longest government shutdown in U.S.
history to an end.

Speaker 4 One big thing, as we've said, that is not in that deal is a resolution on the Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats said was the reason for the shutdown in the first place.

Speaker 4 Deirdre, we were just talking about some of the challenges that come next for Democrats who want to push something like that through. What are you watching?

Speaker 3 So those subsidies expire at the end of December, but right now, people across the country are in open enrollment and shopping for their health care plans.

Speaker 3 So they're already seeing what the premium increases will be when those subsidies go away. So we're starting to see more and more people be aware of the sticker shock.

Speaker 3 And we have all kinds of figures about how much it's going to go up in various states for individuals, for families.

Speaker 3 I think what we're looking at is how quickly can there be a potential bipartisan deal to address these?

Speaker 3 Jean Shaheen, the Democrat from New Hampshire who proposed the first bill on this back in, I think, 2019, is sort of leading the talks for Democrats.

Speaker 3 She maintains that there is something that's doable to pass in the Senate.

Speaker 3 It would probably mean there would be, you know, maybe one year of a straight extension for these subsidies, and then Republicans would demand some kind of income caps that would change how many people could get them.

Speaker 3 There would be some sort of effort to crack down on fraud, which Shaheen said is a legitimate issue that both parties should focus on.

Speaker 3 The big question is, will there be enough to pass it through the Senate? Can they get 60 votes? And then the other issue is like, That's all the guarantee they got out of this deal.

Speaker 3 There's no guarantee for a House vote. And the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, has not committed to bringing anything up.
He's said, you know, we have a bunch of ideas. We'll talk about it.

Speaker 3 I think the X factor is what does President Trump do? Does he engage at all?

Speaker 3 If he wants his party to pass something to address this issue, which sort of falls into the big sort of affordability debate that was such a big part of the elections we just covered last week, maybe he gets involved.

Speaker 3 I think that there's a lot of skepticism about how much he cares about this and how much he'll lean on Republicans in his party to vote for something.

Speaker 3 It's worth remembering, Republicans campaigned to repeal Obamacare, including President Trump. Extending these is preserving and expanding a program that they all hated.

Speaker 3 I think the problem is they don't really have any proposals of their own. What do they do to show that they're acting on something that their constituents care about?

Speaker 5 People are seeing really big increases in their premiums as they're trying to buy health care through the either state exchanges or the federal exchanges to buy that private private health insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act.

Speaker 5 And the only thing really Trump has floated at this point is sending people $2,000 checks. That's not really going to cut it for most people in seeing how much their premiums have gone up.

Speaker 5 So oftentimes you see in politics, there seems to be a kind of band-aid approach when really there needs to be a comprehensive approach to solve a problem that's been intractable for many, many years.

Speaker 5 and became a huge flashpoint during the Obama administration. I think the box that Republicans are in politically politically now is that the Affordable Care Act has gotten much more popular.

Speaker 5 And there are a lot of people who are using these exchanges, you know, compared to a time when if you lost your job, you had a really difficult time buying health care.

Speaker 5 There was very little ability to go and do that. Of course, it was Democrats who sunsetted these subsidies.
And that's an argument that Republicans are making about that as well.

Speaker 5 So, you know, this is a huge problem. It's really difficult to do.
Republicans did not want to negotiate during the shutdown.

Speaker 5 But now that Democrats have elevated this issue, it does appear to be something that at least moderate Republicans are feeling like they are going to have to negotiate on.

Speaker 4 It's big dollars, but it's also a large number of Americans, right? I mean, something like 20 million Americans are affected by this.

Speaker 3 Or will be affected by this, no doubt. I mean, I think the other big question for House Speaker Mike Johnson is, look, he presides over a razor-thin majority.

Speaker 3 The people who could keep him, Speaker, are just less than two dozen people who represent these swing districts, where a lot of people rely on these subsidies.

Speaker 3 During the shutdown, there was a group of House Republicans that wrote a letter to the Speaker and was like, we need to deal with this.

Speaker 3 And does he focus on something that will help them deliver for their constituents?

Speaker 3 Or does he listen to, you know, the vast majority of his conference, which has been pretty opposed to extending these kinds of subsidies. I do think it's interesting that you had

Speaker 3 someone like Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene come out and really criticize the speaker for basically saying our leadership has no plan whatsoever to deal with this.

Speaker 3 My own kids are seeing these major premium increases. She has adult children that buy health care from the exchanges in Georgia, and she was saying, look, we need to deal with this.

Speaker 3 I'm hearing about this from people in my Republican district. That's a political message that I think the speaker is going to come under increasing pressure to have to respond to.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, as we mentioned, most of the government funding only goes through the end of January. So we could be, what, Judre, back in this same situation again in a few months?

Speaker 4 What's going to happen next?

Speaker 5 Aaron Powell, when's the last time an actual budget was passed?

Speaker 5 Forget it, right?

Speaker 3 The 90s. I mean, yeah.
I mean, they've just been doing these sort of like full-year continuing resolutions, partial year continuing resolutions.

Speaker 4 Has the can been kicked so many times that it's just dilapidated?

Speaker 3 Well, it's also interesting that we're still dealing with Biden-level funding bills

Speaker 3 with a Congress that's run by Republicans of both chambers.

Speaker 3 I think the bipartisan will to negotiate individual spending bills is a tough prospect given the politics following this 43-day standoff.

Speaker 3 Things are just really partisan and toxic on the Hill right now.

Speaker 3 I think we'll see what happens. during this debate in December about the health care subsidies, what comes out of that.
That fight could extend into January.

Speaker 3 I covered this rally on the East Front steps yesterday. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stood there and basically, it seemed to me like almost a kickoff to the midterm elections.

Speaker 8 House Democrats will continue the fight to address the Republican health care crisis, and House Democrats will fight to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. This fight is not over.

Speaker 8 We're just getting started.

Speaker 3 You could see the messaging that they're already out there there hammering away to blame all of this on Republicans.

Speaker 3 So regardless of whether or not there's like a solution to this issue, we're going to hear about it from now until the midterms.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and I think it depends on a lot of things here if the government will shut down again. You know, is there an actual vote on these health care subsidies?

Speaker 5 You know, what lessons did Democrats take out of the shutdown in the first place?

Speaker 5 Because we've seen people all across the Democratic side, you know, wondering what the strategy was here and what the point of all this was. And California Governor Gavin Newsom called it pathetic.

Speaker 5 He said he was wondering what the point of even doing this was if you weren't going to see it out through the long term.

Speaker 5 So I think there's a lot of questions here about how Democrats wind up coming together. If they come together, does the fire within the base subside somehow between now and then?

Speaker 5 Or does it continue to rage? And what are they asking for in a fight?

Speaker 5 I think all of this, though, really just is emblematic of the fact that life in the minority for Democrats in the Trump era is really, really, really difficult.

Speaker 5 They have a really hard time figuring out how to position themselves to be able to extract anything on their priority list to be able to make some change and to satisfy the people who they're representing when they look at polling and see that a majority of people disapprove of the job that the president is doing.

Speaker 5 It's incredibly frustrating for a lot of Democrats.

Speaker 4 All right, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Sarah McCammon, I cover politics.

Speaker 3 I'm Deirdre Walsh, I cover Congress.

Speaker 5 And I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

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