Mike Johnson Skips ACA Subsidies in Plans to Tackle Health Care Costs

The speaker’s ideas to lower health care costs include “innovation,” according to a photo of the slide shared with NOTUS.

Mike Johnson

Jose Luis Magana/AP

House Speaker Mike Johnson presented Republican members on Wednesday with a list of 10 options to address health care costs, two sources told NOTUS. None of them involved extending Affordable Care Act subsidies.

The expanded subsidies are set to expire in a matter of weeks, which would spike costs for more than 20 million people.

During the weekly closed-door meeting, Johnson presented members with a slide containing options of how Republicans can “lower health care costs for everyone, give Americans more options for health care, and fight the middlemen,” according to a photo of the slide reviewed by NOTUS.

Those options were:

  • Association Health Plans
  • Choice Accounts
  • Health Savings Accounts
  • Cost Sharing Reductions
  • Codify Trump Administration rules to fix Unaffordable Care Act
  • PBM Reform
  • Innovation
  • Price Transparency
  • Site Neutrality
  • Provider-owned Hospitals

Johnson told the members that the House would not pursue all of these items, but would do “two or three” of them and he wanted members to discuss which ones they wanted, one of the sources told NOTUS.

The discussion was “cordial,” the source said, but they also added there is “no consensus” at all and there is still a long way to go before they land on anything that resembles a health care plan.

The Senate is pushing to address the issue more quickly. It will vote on Wednesday on a Democratic-led proposal to extend the ACA subsidies for three years, and follow up with a vote on a Republican-led proposal to create new health care savings accounts for Americans.