Ron Johnson Talking to Democrats About Partial ACA Fix
Wants to restore some of ACA tax credits. Tammy Baldwin open to compromise.
U.S. Senator Ron Johnson. File photo by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Wisconsin Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson says he’s talking to Democrats about passing some type of assistance for people who lost health insurance tax credits at the end of last year.
Johnson, who ran in 2010 on a pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act, has been among the law’s most outspoken critics during his 15 years in the Senate. He remains intensely opposed to the ACA, blaming it for inflating health care costs.
A key element of the law is its federal marketplace, where people can shop for and enroll in health insurance plans. From its inception, the ACA set aside tax credits to help people pay for health insurance, depending on their incomes. In 2021, Democrats passed enhanced health insurance tax credits that increased those subsidies and offered them for the first time to people with higher incomes.
Democrats have tried repeatedly to extend those enhanced subsidies, which were at the center of the political fight that led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Earlier this month, 17 Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Prairie du Chien, sided with Democrats to pass a bill to extend the credits, but it was rejected by Republicans in the U.S. Senate.
In an interview with PBS Wisconsin’s “Here & Now,” Johnson indicated he’s exploring a more limited approach.
“What I’ve been told is there are enough Democrats who will cosponsor that. But right now, I think they’re still holding out hope that they can extend all the subsidies,” Johnson said. “I just believe that’s dead on arrival here in the Senate. We voted that down multiple times during the shutdown. That’s just not going to happen.”
Instead, Johnson said he’s exploring a way to help people earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, who got cut off when the extended subsidies expired.
“Some of these folks close to retirement are facing premiums of … $38,000 a year,” Johnson said. “So I’d like to help them.”
Johnson said he did not want to restore enhanced subsidies for people at lower income levels, who are already receiving the original tax credits through the ACA.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 400 percent of the federal poverty level was $84,600 for a family of two in 2025.
Asked about Johnson’s comments, Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin left the door open to some sort of compromise.
“I believe that there is a lot of room for negotiation on the extension of the Affordable Care Act, tax credits,” Baldwin said.
Baldwin said she has a constituent who’s paying 40 percent of their income on health premiums, suggesting Congress should consider capping how much people pay for insurance.
“There is no reason in my mind that we can’t have reasonable income cap or to have a provision that says that you can’t be expected to pay more than a certain percentage of your income on health care,” Baldwin said.
Already, there are signs the loss of enhanced credits has had an effect on enrollment. Nationally, around 800,000 fewer people have selected plans compared to a similar time last year. In Wisconsin, enrollment was down by about 17,000.
While Baldwin indicated a willingness to talk to Republicans, she was critical of Johnson and others for blocking a full restoration of the ACA credits.
“We had a moment in the Senate to take up the bill that was passed in the House of Representatives that would have extended the tax credits for three years,” Baldwin said. “And my Republican colleagues blocked it.”
Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson talking to Democrats about partial ACA fix was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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Shouldn’t the fix be Medicare for All and the abolishing of both the ACA and Medicare Advantage? Am I too much of a freaking radical for the Democratic Party? WTF!
While we are at it maybe abolish ICE and the whole of Dubya’s Department of Homeland Security. Why are we normalizing creeping fascist bulls#@t. I thought we wanted smaller government not government constantly getting in your “grill”.
Get rid of the speed bumps too.
Yeah!!! What Duane siad!!!
(BTW…I can live with the speed bumps if the rest of his list gets addressed.)
Whatever the 1% wants, it seems, the 1% gets! We are ripped off many times over by the private healthcare system as compared to Canada’s and other country’s single payer systems. The ACA also acts as a check on this same 1%’s overbillings and price gouging and unneeded medical procedures, just as Medicare and Medicaid do, perhaps that is the real reason for for destroying these programs.
From the very beginning, the ACA was only a first step in healthcare reform. There were two basic components, 1) to get more people into efficacious health insurance plans to reduce the number of uninsured using the ER as their primary care provider, and 2) provide financial support to hospitals–in particular rural hospitals–prepare for an eventual switch to a proactive approach to health care. The first step was to get all hospitals and clinics to adopt electronic medical records (EMR.) After that, start adding preventive care as part of diagnosing.
RRRs (radical reactionary republicans) like Ron Jon have spent the last 15 years undermining the ACA. Since they never had the votes to repeal it, nor any viable plan to replace it. The core of the ACA was the plan authored by Senator Grassley (R, Iowa.) Even though it was the plan the RRRs put forth, they had vowed to never support anything President Obama supported. Instead, they stopped funding more and more components of the plan including their BBB last July, which stopped the funding the last ACA component, individual health insurance credits. For Ron Jon to blame the ACA for our current mess, is at best laughable.
The result of RRRs political games, our rural healthcare system collapsed leaving many residents without any facilities within 50 miles. The corporatization of healthcare has resulted in a 2 tier health system, with the wealthiest having access to high quality care, and urban working class are left to health that is being rationed by systems more interested in the bottom-line than patient care.
The state of healthcare is entirely on the RRRs, though they always blame the ACA. They continue to believe market driven healthcare provides the best care, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. RRRs like Ron Jon are not interested in how their policies have resulted in the “death committees” rationing health care. The term “death committees” has been replaced by the arbitrary “prior authorization,” and diagnosis by insurance set checklists.
The meager bone Ron Jon is offering does nothing to undo the damage he and his colleagues have caused. Our healthcare system is irrevocably broken. Medicare for all is the next logical step to righting the US healthcare system.
Gee, I am not worried. Trump and the republicans assured us they had a plan over 8 years ago.