WASHINGTON — This morning, at the weekly House Republican Leadership press conference, Speaker Johnson discussed Republican efforts to fix the Democrats’ broken health care system and addressed their refusal to support cost sharing reductions – included in the House-passed version of the Working Families Tax Cuts – reforms Democrats used to support that would have lowered health care premiums by 12% for all Americans.
“Every American watching today should remember that the Democrats had a chance to actually lower your premiums six months ago, and they refuse because they wanted to keep health care as a political football,” Speaker Johnson said. “They do not want a solution. They want an issue.”
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full remarks here
On Republican efforts to fix Democrats broken health care system:
The Democrats had a chance to vote to make life more affordable earlier this year, in the Working Families Tax Cuts, big beautiful bill, and they blew it. The House version of the bill, you may remember, included cost sharing reductions. We passed that out of the House; we sent it to the Senate. And what that would’ve done is would’ve lowered premiums for the average American family by over 12%. Democrats fought to strip that out of the bill. Every American watching today should remember that the Democrats had a chance to actually lower your premium six months ago and they refused because they wanted to keep health care as a political football. They do not want a solution. They want an issue. That’s what this is about. They use the American taxpayers – they admitted themselves during the longest shutdown in US History a few weeks back – as leverage in this cynical political game.
In the coming days, what you’re going to see is the other party, the Republican Party, continuing to do the important work that we’ve already begun to actually lower the cost of health care and reduce fraud. And we hope Democrats will join us in those efforts. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is already demonstrating that we know how to do this. We’re not just talking about it. We’ve done it in the Working Families Tax Cuts, you’ll remember in the Medicaid reforms, we went after program integrity. We didn’t change the substance of Medicaid as they claim falsely. We went to program integrity. Why? Because we owed that to the American taxpayers. We got ineligible recipients off of Medicaid, and we cut out the fraud and abuse. And the CBO said, they’ve calculated it, it saved $185 billion for American taxpayers and reduced premiums. We reformed it to strengthen Medicaid. Those same principles are going to guide us in the months, weeks, and days forward. As Leader Scalise noted, we have some low hanging fruit, we have some things that every Republican agrees to. Democrats won’t, remember. They don’t actually want to fix this problem. But you’re going to see a package come together that’ll be on the floor next week. That will actually reduce premiums for 100% of Americans who were on health insurance, not just the 7%. Remember, the COVID-era subsidy only covers 7% of Americans, and it was passed and extended without any reforms at all. It would only reduce their premiums by 4%. They’re using that as a red herring. The overall system is broken, and we’re the ones that are going to fix it. You will see that laid out.
On Democrats blaming Republicans for four failed years of the Biden Administration:
Remember, we inherited massive inflation from the previous administration. It’s no secret that affordability is the flashpoint, right, in recent weeks. We had four catastrophic years of Bidenomics that we inherited. The Biden Administration spent like drunken sailors, and they attempted to tax and regulate their way to prosperity. And we all knew when they were doing it, it would not work. It had exactly the opposite effect. The result was inflation skyrocketed, gas prices reached record highs, home ownership declined, credit card debt increased. All those things that everybody felt, and they’re still feeling now. Now, the American people gave us a mandate in the election. The President won the electoral college soundly. He won a big majority, the popular vote, and we got the highest vote total for House Republicans in the history of this institution. And they charged us to go fix this. We began that process with the big beautiful bill, and we have never let up on the accelerator, to keep it going day by day, week by week, notching away at this, trying to fix everything that the previous team broke. Now, I wish we could flip a switch right after the election and make it all go away, make it all right, but you know, that’s not how the economy works. It takes some time to implement new policies and root out the bad things, and that’s what’s happening.
It’s a fact that the Biden Administration and their Democrat enablers in Congress, we cannot forget, wrecked the US economy. That’s what happened. And we had to take it over in January. This is why Democrats’ newfound claims about affordability are just patently absurd. Here are the facts. And you know, many of you don’t write about it, but these are the facts. They’re undisputed. They broke the economy, and now they want to lecture to the American people about affordability. They opened our borders, and now they want to lecture to the American people about immigration and border enforcement. They broke the American health care system, they caused premiums to skyrocket, and now they have the audacity to tell Republicans that the only way to save it is to throw hundreds of billions of dollars to health insurance companies, which would merely fuel a system that is rife with fraud, waste, and abuse. You cannot be an arsonist and a firefighter at the same time. That’s the message for the Democrats.
On Democrats’ health care plan and their refusal to address waste, fraud, and abuse:
Let’s be very clear about one thing. When the Democrats talk about health care affordability, they are talking about one thing and one thing only: they are talking about continuing handouts to big insurance companies. They have no ideas; they have no desire to fix the broken system they’ve created. They just want to subsidize it. And subsidy is a big word. It means they’re taking taxpayer dollars and funding a broken system – that is their entire affordability agenda in a nutshell. This agenda does not lower health care costs. All it does is hide the cost of the failed law, which we assume is the point. And their proposal, which is a three-year extension of these enhanced subsidies, the Democrat COVID subsidies that they created, that they put the expiration date on for this December, that proposal to extend that for three years is devoid of any reforms to clamp down on the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse. And, it continues to provide taxpayers subsidized health care to Americans who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual salary.
The Democrats broke America’s health care system when they gave us the Unaffordable Care Act, Obamacare, 15 years ago. Remember all the promises? I mean, some of y’all were here. The average premium, the average family’s going to go down $2,500 a year. You’re going to be able to keep your doctor, you’re going to love this system. But none of that was true. In fact, it’s the opposite. And premiums have risen because they broke the system, dramatically, over that time in some areas, as much as 70% and some over 90%. And those things are still on a trajectory to rise further now.
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