Hot-button issues in the 119th Congress will not be resolved this year. Lawmakers will go home for the holidays and won’t have to vote on extending ACA health care subsidies.
The House and Senate will hold their final votes today before recessing for the year. The vote to extend the coronavirus subsidy is not included in the official timetable. The subsidy will expire on December 31. That means Congress will wait until January to address the sure-to-rise health care costs.
The House passed a Republican-led health care plan last night that would not extend subsidies, but the Senate has no plans to take it up.
“We’re going to deal with this in January,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, told reporters on Wednesday. “These things take a lot of twists and turns. We’ve had a lot of twists and turns just this week.”
One of those twists was a stunning coup against House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who dashed hopes of a vote earlier this week. Some moderate Republicans have sided with Democrats in pushing for a vote on extending Medicaid subsidies before the deadline. One of the defectors, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, said Johnson and House leadership made a “mistake” by not bringing the bipartisan proposal up for consideration.
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“They’re concerned that this bill … will pass,” Fitzpatrick said Wednesday. “One of the scary reasons for not bringing a bill up for consideration is the fear that it will pass,” he said.
Johnson said a vote on the Democratic proposal to extend subsidies was “inevitable.”
“When we come back, it will be operational the first week of January,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday.
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