The NPR Politics Podcast - The Health Insurance Fight Fueling The Government Shutdown

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

At the heart of the federal government shutdown is a fight on Capitol Hill over health insurance subsidies. We discuss the likely impact of not extending those subsidies past their expiration at the end of the year, plus how the government shutdown is forcing some family planning clinics to close.This episode: White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram, health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin, and congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Celebrate with us in D.C. at NPR headquarters. You can find information on tickets and more at npr.org slash politics live show. This is Mark Borges from Modesto, California. I'm currently in Sweden and halfway through a European backpacking trip that I started after finishing my master's. This podcast was recorded at 1.13 p.m. on Tuesday, October 21st, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be exploring Scandinavia's pristine wilderness. All right. Here's the show. You have so many podcast listeners who are like global, fun trekking traveler people.

That sounds really nice. Can I explore the wilderness with you? How do we get out there, too? Hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Dupa Shibaram. I cover the White House. I'm Barbara Sprint coming from the wilderness of Capitol Hill. And NPR health policy correspondent, Selena Simmons-Duffin is here with us today. Hey, Selena. Hi, Deepa. Okay, so today on the show, we are on day 21 of the federal government shutdown. And we're digging into the health care issue at the center of the fight over reopening the government.

So, Barbara, you're in the wilderness of Capitol Hill. How is health policy fueling this shutdown fight? where you are? Well, let's start with the politics of this. If we can all cast our minds back to March of this year, which feels like forever ago, actually wasn't that long ago, you'll remember that's when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer provided a key Democratic vote that Republicans needed to advance a spending bill. Deja vu, kind of. And I was with House Democrats at a retreat at that time, and there was so much outrage. You know, Senate Democrats, a majority of House Democrats, really wanted to use that shutdown possibility as leverage. You know, arguing a It's one of the few opportunities that they have as a party in the minority.

This time around, Senate and House Democrats have been unified in not lending support to a GOP bill that would be a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open. And this brings us to that policy question. What's the thing that Senate Democrats are demanding in this? Well, they are tying their support of any bill to fund the government to extending boosted up tax credits that were enacted in 2021 that made the Affordable Care Act health care premiums more affordable. Those expire at the end of the year, and Democrats are using this as an opportunity to force an extension of them now. Senate Republicans have said these are separate issues, fund the government first, and then we can negotiate on those enhanced credits. Okay, so, Selena, like Barbara said, those subsidies were boosted up during the pandemic in 2021. They're set to expire at the end of the year.

But who gets them? And what do they do? Yeah. So just to be crystal clear for people who find health insurance confusing, which is probably most of us. These are plans that individuals buy. So if you don't get health insurance through your job and you don't qualify for one of the public programs like Medicaid,

which is for low-income people, Medicare, which is for people over the age of 65, you can go to health care.gov or any of the state marketplaces and just shop for a plan. And if you were to just shop for a plan and actually pay the full premium that these health insurance companies want you to pay, you would probably be unable to afford them. So what the federal government did when they set up these marketplaces in the first place, they said, okay, we're going to cover some of your monthly costs so that you can actually afford this plan so you can get covered. And it kind of worked for a while, like 11 million, 12 million people would sign up for these plans. But in 2021, when they enhanced these subsidies, the federal government started kicking in,

much more of the cost of the monthly premium, which meant that people were like, oh, actually this is a good deal. Like, I can get covered and afford this premium and, you know, come in from being uninsured. The uninsured rate went to the lowest level it's ever been

in American history. The number of people in these plans ballooned to 24 million. And these are small business owners. They are small business employees, farmers, ranchers. I mean, this is like the only option for people in these professions where employer-based insurance is not available.

So it's a big deal. That is a big deal. So, Barbara, I mean, the people that Salina is talking about here, 24 million of these people, I mean, some of them live in places represented by Republicans in Congress, right? How are those lawmakers responding to the idea that some of their constituents might lose these subsidies? These are really popular. You know, in polling voters across the political spectrum support. Congress extending these credits.

There is a political reality here that you're getting at, though, which is three of the four enrollees live in states that President Trump won last year. But importantly, these are very expensive. You know, the subsidies keep the costs down for consumers, but the flip side is that they cost the government a lot of money. The Congressional Budget Office, it's nonpartisan. It estimates that it would cost $350 billion over the next decade if those enhanced credits were expanded permanently. Republicans argue these credits were meant to be temporary,

put in place during the COVID pandemic. That price tag is going to make it extremely difficult to get a bipartisan deal on adjusting these. This only happens with a bipartisan deal because of the numbers on the hill. And there are a handful of Republican lawmakers who have publicly said that they support extending those, albeit with tweaks. One that stands out to me is Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green. And she's particularly interesting to me here because she is a staunch ally of President Trump. And as we have seen time and time again, the president is sort of the X factor in everything. You know, we've seen him blow up deals on the hill before. Leadership thinks that they're in one place. And then the president makes a comment, you know, as he's getting on or off a plane or

post something to social media and things change. So his involvement in this at any sort of phase, I think, could really shift things up and seeing one of his like major allies on the Hill publicly kind of dragged the party for not stepping on this negotiation earlier. I think is kind of interesting. So I talked to the president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. So there are insurance commissioners all across the country in every single state. The president currently is someone named John Godfrey. He was an elected Republican in North Dakota. And he said that the only way that it's possible for enhanced subsidies to affect people when they log in to get new insurance for this coming year is if the enhanced subsidies are extended exactly the way they are

right now because when insurance carriers submitted their rates for this year, they did so imagining that the enhanced subsidies were not extended and then another version for if they were extended. So if they are extended at the very last minute, states are right. to go with the subsidized premiums. Like you will log in, your premiums will look like they did last year, problem solved, no worries. If lawmakers want to get in there and start changing the structure of the subsidies or changing exceptions, then that's not going to work. And it's going to be a big mess.

Well, Selena, what is the impact here if these subsidies do go away at the end of the year? Well, it's going to mean that people's costs that they pay every month for their health insurance premiums are going to just skyrocket. The average increase is over 100%. So you're getting the same plan you paid for last year, but you're paying double. I talked to a one woman in West Virginia who's paying $300 a month now. And she's looking at a monthly premium of $2,800. Whoa. That's a big difference. For some people, depending on age and income and state and all of these other factors, it's unworkable for them. So the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of what this will mean in terms of people dropping health insurance and estimated that 4 million people will

become uninsured if these enhanced credits aren't extended. And that's over the next 10 years. But there's also been some commentary that that might be an underestimate. So if a lot of people make that calculation and leave these insurance marketplaces, that's going to affect how they work at all because it's going to mean that those younger, healthier people aren't in the risk pool. You know, it's all complicated, but basically it's really big trouble for this whole section of how Americans get health insurance. And yeah, I mean, I think that there's no question that if these enhanced subsidies go away, it's going to have an enormous impact on people. Well, you're talking about what a big impact this is and how much it'll affect, particularly

the people who won't be insured anymore. How much is the public paying attention to this? Is there any sense that this is something that people are really worried about? Yeah. I mean, as Barbara mentioned, people like these enhanced credits and want Congress to extend them. And that includes Republicans. That includes specifically people who subscribe to Make America Great Again kind of philosophy. People think that this is a good deal and that it's a good use of government money. But I do think that there are a lot of people who aren't paying attention to this. And November 1st is a really key date because that is when open enrollment starts in these plans. And I think once people start logging on and like kind of doing this annoying routine thing that you do every fall to

try to figure out what insurance you're going to get, when they see the numbers that they're going to be asked to pay for these plans, I think you're going to have a huge new wave of awareness in the public that this is happening. Oh, that's coming up, November 1st. All right, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment. And we're back. So, Selena, you recently returned from a reporting trip to Maine. You were reporting on sexual and reproductive health clinics. While you were there, they got some concerning news related to this government shutdown. What did you hear? Yeah, so I was visiting Maine family planning, which is a pretty big organization it's existed for 50 years, and they run sexual reproductive health

clinics all over the state, which is extremely rural. They're in school centers. They're in community health clinics, and they're providing birth control, sexually transmitted infectious disease testing and treatment. They also provide abortion. And the reason why I was there was related to how new legislation has meant that they can't bill Medicaid for any of the services they provide, but they also receive Title X funding, which is a 50-year-old grant program that the federal government sends out to clinics all over the country and subsidizes treatment for people who don't have insurance but who need these things, like birth control, as I said, like STI testing. And when I was there, it turned out that all of the staff that administer the Title X program at the

Department of Health and Human Services, called the Office of Population Affairs, had been fired. They were locked out of their accounts, and then eventually, over the course of a few days, it became clear that that was not a mistake, that they were no longer employed. While I was interviewing the president and CEO of Maine Family Planning, George Hill, he mentioned that they don't really know what the future holds for them. We don't know now what it means that the office. Office of Population Affairs is reported to have been eliminated. We were scheduled to have a call with our program officer, our lead contact person in the Office of Population Affairs today at

1030 didn't happen. So these main clinics that you visited, I mean, they aren't the only ones that rely on Title 10 funding. Can you just give me an idea, like how many clinics are we talking about throughout the country. Yeah, I mean, the way it works is that the federal government gets this money and sends it out to grantees. Main family planning is the grantee for the whole state, and then it sends out money to different clinics. All in all, it's 4,000 clinics across the country that provide these services that rely on Title 10 funding. So when I started reporting on this, I was speaking to the laid-off workers from the Office of Population Affairs. And I also spoke to Jesse Hitchens, who runs a Title 10 clinic in Nebraska, she told me that Title 10 has this

huge history of having really positive results. And she pointed to the fact that Nebraska had really high syphilis and gonorrhea rates that they'd been able to bring down in recent years. We are likely to see those diseases spike in our rural communities that no longer have access because we will have to shudder outreach points for our rural communities. It's terrifying. For this clinic and for main family planning and all those other clinics that are relying on this funding, it seems like they're going to have access to their funding through the end of March. What happens after that is very unclear.

If the staff that runs this program isn't there, if this is the end of Title X, that could be a really, really big deal. I mean, Barbara, this isn't the first set of funding cuts for these clinics, right? I'm curious on the hill, are lawmakers worried about the impact of these kinds of cuts and what that might mean for the midterms next year? We have been hearing a lot about this for quite some time. And politically, you know, it is never too early to start thinking about the political calculus of the midterms. I mean, that is an ever-present question for lawmakers. That's just kind of the world that we live in. You know, from the onset, when Republicans passed a big spending bill earlier this year, Democrats, you know, were intent on making, you know, this issue heading into next year all about health care. That bill, which has since been signed into law, of course, like extends the 2017 tax cuts, adds new tax cuts and partially pays for them with changes to the Medicaid program. Democrats have been consistent on the health care message since President Trump signed that bill into law. This question that we're talking

about these enhanced credits and expiring at the end of the year, adds fodder for Democrats here on this issue, which they see as a winning issue heading into next year. Interesting. And I assume that this doesn't exactly contribute to the government shutdown ending anytime soon. Simply put, like, a shutdown ends when someone blinks and then caves, right? You know, both parties seem pretty convinced that they will not shoulder the public blame of the shutdown. And I think that's part of the reason why we have not seen any. serious negotiations on the Hill. The House hasn't voted in weeks. You know, the Trump administration is taking the lead on much of this. And I think it's worth noting, you know, like the Pentagon

has moved around money to cover the paychecks of service members. They tapped a reserve in tariff revenue to keep a popular nutrition program operational. The White House has announced that TSA agents and ICE agents and other law enforcement officers are going to be paid for work during the shutdown. Well, those are the biggest pain points, right? I mean, those are the pressure points that lawmakers have to contend with during a shutdown, and that starts to put the pressure on and feel the need to negotiate more. You know, with those moves from the White House, it erodes a bit of the sense of urgency among lawmakers to move past this impasse and negotiate and get a deal done. So I'm in the camp that like this is going to go on for a bit longer.

All right. We're going to leave it there for today. Thank you for being here, Selena. You're welcome. I'm Deva Shibaram. I cover the White House. I'm Barbara Sprint. I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.