House GOP Vows to Tackle Healthcare Costs Amid Government Shutdown Looms

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told Newsmax on Monday that once the government shutdown ends, House Republicans are readying ideas to tackle rising healthcare costs. The House on Sept. 19 passed a clean continuing resolution 217-212 that would fund the federal government through Nov. 21, but the measure quickly stalled in the Senate amid a broader fight over Affordable Care Act subsidies.

The pandemic-era subsidies created by Democrats are set to expire at year’s end. During his appearance on “The Record With Greta Van Susteren,” Johnson did not say when the House might take up a bipartisan Senate compromise that would fund the federal government through Jan. 30. The Senate cleared a key procedural hurdle Sunday night to advance the legislation, but a final floor vote could still be days away.

Johnson said Republicans had included a plan in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to address rising healthcare costs, but Democrats stripped it out. “The problem is that we are subsidizing very wealthy insurance companies,” Johnson said. “That is not helping costs go down. It’s driving premiums up even higher. So, Republicans want to fix the broken system. We don’t want to throw good money at a broken and failing system. And the Affordable Care Act has been that since it was signed into law, passed by the Democrats alone back in 2010.”

Johnson added, “We’ve got to reduce the cost of healthcare and the cost of living, and Republicans are the ones that have the ideas to do that.” He claimed the OBBB contained a provision that would have reduced healthcare premiums by 12.7%, but Democrats fought to remove it. “If they cared so much about healthcare costs, they shouldn’t be fighting provisions like that,” he said.

“We’re putting together some ideas that will drive the premiums down because healthcare is too expensive in this country. It’s too expensive because the Democrats built a system that doesn’t work. So, we need to look at the root causes of the costs that have skyrocketed and address that for the people. Merely subsidizing something is not the answer. When the government subsidizes something, it almost always means it’s not working. And that’s the problem.”

With the subsidies set to expire on Dec. 31, Johnson emphasized the urgency, stating, “It’s an urgent matter for us, which is why we put it into the bill that we passed in the early summer. The Democrats fought to take it out. So, we’re reintroducing some of these ideas. There’s a lot of ideas on how to drive the cost down, and we have November and December to work on that.”

He concluded, “We’re going to have to get a bipartisan consensus on some of this. And so, we’ll be presenting our ideas and putting them on the table. The Democrats don’t have any reform ideas at all. Their argument is they want a completely unreformed continuation. They would do it permanently, most of them on government just subsidizing the insurance companies. And that is not the solution.”