Another week has gone by with no fix for a looming expiration of Affordable Care Act tax credits that could impact hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans, frustrating New Jersey members of Congress from both parties.
Sticking to a promise made as part of the deal that ended the government shutdown, Senate Republicans put up a Democratic-led three-year extension bill for a vote yesterday, alongside a health care proposal of their own that didn’t include an ACA subsidy extension. Both votes were doomed to fail from the beginning, and did: each proposal got 51 yes votes, well below the 60 needed to break the filibuster.
Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim both voted for the Democratic bill and against the Republican one, blaming the GOP majority for any future premium hikes that occur once the subsidies expire at the end of the year. “Today, my Republican colleagues had the chance to lower health care costs, and instead they voted to more than double premiums costs for over 20 million Americans,” Booker said in a statement.
In the House, meanwhile, the situation is even murkier. No fewer than four different health care efforts are underway, all with their own downsides. Two bipartisan bills are circulating, one of them led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), as is the Democratic three-year extension; a fourth proposal from GOP leaders is set to be unveiled sometime soon.
The Gottheimer bill and a rival bipartisan bill authored by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pennsylvania), previously Gottheimer’s partner as co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, are both the subject of discharge petitions, a method of circumventing House leadership that forces a bill to the floor if it gets 218 signatures. The two bills are similar, but Gottheimer’s extends the credits for one year while Fitzpatrick’s does so for two years, both with new income restrictions and guardrails in place.
So far in the New Jersey delegation, Gottheimer has only signed the petition for his own bill, while Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) – one of the most vocally pro-extension members of the GOP conference – has signed both.
“As distasteful as it is, for the short term, we need to get through this, we need to take care of our people, and we need to take care of ourselves politically,” Van Drew said yesterday.
Van Drew noted, however, that he opposes Democrats’ three-year bill; he also said that he anticipates the Republican proposal will lack an ACA subsidy extension.
Both bipartisan discharge petitions now have enough Republican support that, if every House Democrat were to sign on, they would come to the floor for a vote. (All House Democrats have signed a discharge petition for the partisan three-year extension, but Republicans are unlikely to provide the final few signatures needed for that to succeed.)
Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) – a member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which oversees health care policy – said it’s “in Republicans’ court” to find a solution for an issue that has been known to be looming all year. As for the discharge petitions, Menendez said most Democrats will remain in a holding pattern until Democratic leaders decide what the caucus’s gameplan will be.
“We’re not going to sign the petitions, we’re going to wait for leadership to give us guidance, because we don’t want to negotiate against ourselves,” Menendez said.
