Rep. Kevin Brady says Congress should still provide money for health subsidies.
WASHINGTON — A powerful House Republican said Thursday that Congress should immediately provide money for subsidy payments to health insurance companies, which have been demanding big rate increases or have threatened to flee from Affordable Care Act markets because of President Donald Trump’s threat to cut off the funds.
Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, who is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, went out of his way to make clear that he believes that Congress should continue the subsidies, which compensate insurers for reducing deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for 7 million low-income people.
Trump has said he can stop the payments “anytime I want,” and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, refers to the subsidies as “Obamacare bailout payments.”
But at a budget hearing, Brady said the payments were needed “to help stabilize the insurance market and help lower premiums for Americans trapped in Obamacare.”
“We should act within our constitutional authority now to temporarily and legally fund cost-sharing reduction payments as we move away from Obamacare,” Brady said. “Insurers have made clear the lack of certainty is causing 2018 proposed premiums to rise significantly.”
And 2018 is also a midterm election year, in which every seat in the Republican-controlled House and 33 seats in the GOP-controlled Senate are on the ballot.
His statement came one day after Senate Republicans said they were coalescing around a bill that would continue the costsharing subsidies, even as they tried to repeal much of the Affordable Care Act.
The federal government spends $7 billion a year on the subsidies. The money goes directly to insurers, which are required to provide discounts to low-income people regardless of whether the companies are reimbursed by the government.
House Republican leaders had refused to provide money for the subsidies in their bill to repeal the ACA. The White House balked at including the money in a sprawling spending bill to finance the government through September. And Trump has threatened to withhold the subsidies as a way to force Democrats to negotiate with him on a replacement for the 2010 health care law.
But Brady said the payments were needed to help consumers.
“Obamacare’s design flaws were not the fault of the American people,” Brady said. “The people now trapped in Obamacare did what the government mandated them to do — they complied with the law. They should not be left out to dry.”