America's Talking - With shutdown over, fight over Obamacare reform is on

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

(The Center Square) – With the record-long government shutdown finally over, Republicans are ramping up conversations about how to reform Obamacare and address the rising cost of insurance premiums. Democrats, who refused to authorize government funding for 43 days, used the shutdown to bring attention to the expiring enhanced Obamacare Premium Tax Credit. The enhanced subsidies are set to revert to original, pre-pandemic levels on Dec. 31, which would partially contribute to enrollees’ monthly plan payments rising in 2026. Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxRead more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_df79d471-bd13-4ea2-b956-f5645d805869.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America's Talking, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAlep, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. With the federal government shutdown now over, activities related to the federal government are returning to normal. Air travel is starting to stabilize ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Full snack benefits are being paid in November. Federal workers who were furloughed have returned to work and are being paid. Federal parks are reopening. Joining me to discuss this is the Center Square's congressional reporter, Teres Boudreau. Therese, a week into the reopening, have most things stabilized? Yes, I think that's fair to say. As you mentioned, SNAP benefits are getting paid out. People who are waiting on federal loans, you know, farmers or people with small businesses, they're receding those now. There are a lot of workers who the Trump administration fired as part of the reduction in force actions, but they are returning to their jobs per part of the deal that a Senate.

Majority Leader John Thune made with Senate Democrats to get eight of them to vote, to reopen the government. So, and flight travel. I mean, there's still, there's still some delays and some of those are also due to, but some of those are also due to bad weather and things like that. Yeah, I flew to Washington, D.C. on Wednesday and back home on Thursday, I had no flight delays, but I did hear at the airport, yes, Thursday, we're recording this on Friday at the airport on Thursday, there were significant weather delays in Texas places like Dallas. So hopefully these, any current delays are mostly tied to weather incidents and not to, you know, air traffic controllers or airport security not showing up. There. Parks, of course,

are starting, parks that were shuttered during the shutdown are reopening everywhere. And perhaps the most important thing is these federal workers who were furloughed, are not getting paid, are returning to work, are getting paid. That had a significant impact on the economy because when you're not getting paid, you don't have any buying power, right? You can't shop, go out to eat. You got to save what money you do have for the essentials, food and utility costs and things like that. So hopefully the economy starts rolling again. Let's talk Therese, a little bit about what the shutdown was about. And Democrats were holding out over expiring health care subsidies under Obamacare.

Now it looks like that that discussion is moving. Republicans in the Senate promised to have that debate and to schedule a vote on extending those subsidies. What's next? Yeah. So, I mean, if you ask, if you ask Democrats, then, well, if you ask Republicans what the shutdown was about, they'll say, oh, it was just Democrats. trying to, you know, fight Trump and rally to their, you know, far left base. And if U.S. Democrats, they'll say, well, we were fighting over the expiration of the enhanced version, the COVID-19 era boost to the Obamacare premium tax credits.

So these are tax credits that will go directly from the U.S. Treasury to insurers. And then insurers are supposed to lower premiums for people in the ACA market. place who qualify. So the, these, the PTC, they're not going away. So these credits themselves are not expiring. They're simply reverting to pre-pandemic levels. But Democrats were saying that still, you know, people are still going to see hikes in their premiums. If these return to pre-pandemic levels, so we need to extend them, preferably permanently. And so Republicans Republicans had, were very against that, most of them, Republican leaders at least. They, one of their big arguments besides the fact that they, they point to high levels of fraud, just the way that the expansion worked and the kind of loopholes that it created and the incentives that it gave to insurance, insurers to misreport numbers and to enrollees to misreport their income so that they're eligible for a greater,

cut to their premium. So Republicans are they, besides that argument, they argue, oh, it's going to cost a lot, right? So this tax credit, just extending it for one year, the enhanced version of this tax credit would be somewhere around $60 billion. Doing it for 10 years would be anywhere from 350 billion to like $480 billion, depending on what estimate that you take. What is interesting about that, though, is that Republicans, the, according to the logic that they used with the one big beautiful bill where they permanently extended the 2017 tax cuts and jobs tax credits or the majority of them, they permanently extended them. And they did that because they said, this won't cost us anything because it's an extension of current policy. It's just we're continuing the status quo. So instead of costing, you know, however many trillions of dollars it was supposed to cost it by extending them permanently, it'll cost nothing. But they're not using that logic anymore when it comes to these subsidies that are expiring, these tax credits that are expiring, even though it's the same kind of thing. They would just be extending current policy. So that's an interesting side debate that not a lot of people are having, but that's interesting to look at. But the point is, is that

That shutdown, again, as we know, lasted 43 days, longest in government history. And to what sealed the deal to get the government open is Senate Majority Leader John Thune. He, his final offer, which really Democrats didn't really get that much in it. Again, no one really wins during a shutdown is the lesson we can all learn here. But his offer was, we will reverse the Trump's reduction in forces that he made during the shutdown. So again, this wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been a shutdown. So this isn't exactly a win per se for Democrats, you know, just as it is. But he said, we'll reverse those.

And we will have a vote on the expire, on whether to extend the expiring subsidies, the enhanced premium tax credits. So that's going to happen sometime around mid-December. The enhanced version of the credits will expire December 31st. Now, it's highly unlikely that that vote will, that it will pass. Even if it did pass the Senate, House Speaker Mike Johnson hasn't even said he's mom about whether even he'll let it come to the floor for a vote. I think he was pretty burned during the shutdown in terms of negotiations and things like that. So he hasn't even made any promises there. What there has been, what we have been seeing is talks among Republicans about what are some alternatives to extending this.

this enhancement. And a lot of them are talking about things like health savings accounts where they're saying, hey, instead of giving this tax credit to insurers who are legally able to pocket essentially 20% of it. And what if we just gave this money directly to patients that they could put in some kind of health savings account? So depending on what that would look like, it could be something either where they literally, they have this money that they can spend on, you know, basically any medical procedure, dentist, physician, you know, mental health, whatever, or something to where, you know, again, depending on how it's structured, they could, they could apply it to the premiums of the plan of their choice, you know, so it's not just,

oh, well, you will have this premium if you choose this plan. It's, oh, I can choose whatever plan I want. And then this, in my health savings account, I have this money, but I can apply to that premium. So they're arguing, Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, who's a physician, he's very in favor of this. So he, during a hearing recently in front of the Senate Finance Committee, he was talking about this. There's a lot of, you know, back and forth about whether this would actually help or whether it would simply privatize insurance or kick people off. So there's a story up on the Center Square about that if people are interested in more. But it's a very interesting discussion. Terrez, thank you for joining us today.

As she said, listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.