The enhanced tax credits that spurred record enrollment on the health insurance exchanges will go away next year — unless the healthcare industry can convince a Republican Congress to reinforce a central pillar of "Obamacare."
Admittedly, that doesn't look like an easy task. President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress have made their top priorities extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts and cutting spending elsewhere. But that's what some of the sector's biggest players are trying to do, and they have united under an umbrella group called Keep Americans Covered.
Related: Exchange subsidies not doomed under GOP rule
The campaign launched in September, but time is becoming a crucial factor. Republicans have begun their work on Trump's taxes and cuts package, pursuing a partisan "budget reconciliation" bill that could not be subject to a Democratic filibuster under Senate rules. Democrats used the same process to create the enhanced tax credits in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and extend them in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and to enact parts of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 itself.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wants to finish a reconciliation bill by May. Republicans got started last month with a 50-page document that contains trillions in possible savings. Ending the enhanced subsidies is on the list. The menu also includes options that go further, such as eliminating the funding for the ACA Medicaid expansion. And to kill the enhanced subsidies, all Republicans need to do is nothing, since they expire on their own.