Battleground Republicans clash with hard-liners over Obamacare subsidies as party talks health care strategy

By Sarah Ferris, Annie Grayer, CNN

(CNN) — A number of endangered GOP lawmakers on Wednesday privately pressed Republican leaders to address expiring Covid-era health care subsidies — but faced sharp pushback from the right flank of their party.

And House Republican leaders remained adamant that they did not support a short-term fix, making it increasingly likely that the GOP-led Congress will allow the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire at year’s end.

Inside a packed meeting of House Republicans, multiple battleground Republicans, including Rep. Kevin Kiley of California, called on Speaker Mike Johnson to put a bill on the floor that would extend the expiring subsidies for more than 20 million Americans. He argued that it needed to take priority over leadership’s other, longer-term health care plans that are expected to come to the floor next week.

GOP leaders are eying smaller-scale measures, such as expanding HSA accounts and expanding cost-sharing reduction — a way that helps offset costs for lower-income people by requiring insurers to pay more.

“We need to actually pass something that will become law that will stop that health care cliff,” Kiley told reporters after the closed door meeting.

But Kiley said he did not get any commitment from leadership that a vote on the subsidies would happen and warned that leaving town for the holiday recess without a solution would be detrimental for Republicans in their broader fight to address affordability concerns.

“There’s perhaps no single policy measure that would have a more dramatic impact on affordability in the year ahead than doing something about the expiration of the subsidies. So if we go home without addressing that, that is a huge loss,” Kiley shared.

Kiley is among a group of centrist Republicans who are threatening to sign onto a procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition, which would force a vote on their bill over the objections of Johnson and party leaders. Inside Wednesday’s meeting, multiple leadership allies, including Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina, a member of the House Doctors Caucus, made a forceful argument against any discharge petition — attempting to blunt the momentum behind the centrists’ own push.

The closed-door meeting — in which dozens of members debated more than a dozen health care measures — ended Wednesday with little sense of unity on a path forward.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters the leadership team would spend the coming days finding consensus on a handful of bills to come to the floor next week. But the divergence in opinion across the conference on Wednesday is yet another reminder that President Donald Trump and his GOP have yet to unify behind a clear health care agenda eight years after the party’s failed attempt to replace Obamacare.

Johnson and his team plan to spend the next two weeks – their final working days of 2025 — with health care policy at the center of their focus. With the Senate poised to take up its own symbolic votes on health care on Thursday, the House GOP leadership team is under intense pressure to show their own movement.

Johnson, in particular, is facing calls from dozens of members to find some way to tackle health care costs in 2026. That is when tens of millions of Americans will be forced to pay much higher health care premiums, or forgo coverage altogether, when the billions of dollars in enhanced subsidies approved by then-President Joe Biden and Hill Democrats expire at year’s end. And many endangered Republicans see the fate of the Obamacare subsidies as directly tied to the party’s political future in the midterms.

Rep. Mike Lawler of New York — who supports extending those subsidies for now, alongside changes to the program — would not divulge the next step for that determined group of centrists.

“I’m continuing to work towards addressing the immediate issue, which is the expiration of these Obamacare Covid-era subsidies,” Lawler said leaving the meeting. “We’re trying to fix a short-term issue and a longer-term issue.”

But Scalise made clear that party leaders saw no way to extend the subsidies.

“Our members are on both sides of that. So obviously, with only a small majority, you can’t have the conference split and still pass it,” Scalise said.

On the other side of the spectrum are right-wing Republicans like House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, who told CNN that the expiring health care subsidies were a problem caused by the Democrats that they should fix. He said he wouldn’t even begin to consider any subsidy expansion without Hyde protections, prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion.

Rep. Ralph Norman, another conservative hardliner, was even more blunt: “Covid subsidies need to go away.”

“That’s money we don’t have. And Covid’s over with,” he said.

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