For months, Congress has been hamstrung by the upcoming expiration of key Affordable Care Act subsidies, even shutting down for a month and a half over disagreements on whether and how to extend them. Now, with the subsidies officially expiring in just a few weeks and millions of Americans facing insurance cost spikes, it’s do-or-die time to either find a compromise or, as some Republicans would prefer, simply let the credits expire.
One of the highest-profile proposals has a New Jerseyan at its helm: Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), who announced a new bipartisan bill this morning that would extend the credits for one year with a handful of income limitations. The plan from Gottheimer and Virginia Republican Jen Kiggans, “CommonGround 2025,” also includes a framework for longer-term health care fixes that could be negotiated over the course of 2026.
“In just a few days, for millions and millions of Americans, health insurance premiums are going to spike significantly,” Gottheimer told reporters after a press conference on the proposal today. “We have a couple weeks to get something done. That’s it. And we plan to get something done.”
The bill has nearly three dozen co-sponsors from both parties, among them New Jersey Reps. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) and Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), who have for months been among the most vocal members of their caucus on the ACA issue. Van Drew said at today’s CommonGround press conference that while he “do[es] not like the Affordable Care Act,” he believes it’s incumbent on Congress to prevent the credits from expiring at the end of the year.
“We need to ensure that American men, women, and children have uninterrupted care,” Van Drew said. “We have to be humane and human about this as well. This is tricky business, but this is a good start.”
The CommonGround 2025 coalition is pushing for both the House and the Senate to vote on their proposal before December 18, when both chambers of Congress are set to leave for their holiday recess.
But Gottheimer’s bill isn’t the only game in town. Some other House moderates have compromise ideas of their own; House Republican leaders, who have generally been cool to the idea of extending the subsidies, reportedly plan to release a health care proposal next week; and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has put forward a discharge petition on a bill that would extend the credits for three years. (Jeffries’s discharge petition has been signed by every member of the Democratic caucus, but no Republicans have joined them.)
As for the Senate, there will definitely be a vote on some ACA proposal – that was a key part of the bipartisan deal to reopen the government last month – but whether that proposal has a chance of passing is another matter. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is pushing the same three-year extension as House Democrats, an effort that is likely to be blocked by Senate Republicans.
And regardless of what Congress does, there’s also the looming X factor of President Donald Trump; the Trump administration planned on releasing a health care proposal last month, but it reportedly stalled amid internal Republican disagreements.
Senator Andy Kim blamed the logjam on Trump and congressional Republican leaders, without whom he believes a majority of both houses of Congress would be willing to support a reasonable subsidy extension proposal. Kim said the House Republicans he’s talked to are “furious” over the lack of action from their party’s top brass.
“The Republicans say they have ideas, but there’s nothing ready to go, nothing that can move that fast,” Kim said. “It makes no sense to me. We’re going to continue to push, but at this point, Republicans have let this go on for so long that there’s an inevitability now that so many families are going to be hurt.”
If and when the credits expire on January 1, the impacts for many New Jerseyans would be substantial. One estimate earlier this year from the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance found that 454,016 New Jerseyans would see a rise in health care costs, with an average cost spike of $1,260 per year for those affected; the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that, nationwide, an expiration could lead to four million people losing health coverage.
Most of the Republican caucus, however, has never liked the ACA credits, which were implemented under President Joe Biden as a temporary Covid-era policy. Some Republicans (among them Van Drew) say that preventing the subsidies from expiring is a political necessity ahead of the 2026 midterms, but more conservative members of the caucus would rather not do anything to support parts of Obamacare: “No matter how much lipstick you put on that pig, it’s still a pig,” Texas Republican Jodey Arrington told Fox News.
The mood among many Democrats, meanwhile, is that any proposal that extends the credits – whether it be Gottheimer’s one-year compromise bill, Jeffries’s clean three-year extension, or something else – is worth supporting. Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon), who has signed Jeffries’s discharge petition but is not a co-sponsor of Gottheimer’s bill, said that there’s “no question” she’d be open to supporting any credit extension that makes it to the House floor.
“The important part is making sure that there’s no break in terms of their insurance coverage,” Pou said. “[I’d support] whatever is agreeable on both sides – so long as it makes sense, in terms of what we’re doing – absolutely.”
