GOP grows uneasy over voters’ health care premiums amid shutdown standoff
- - GOP grows uneasy over voters’ health care premiums amid shutdown standoff
Sarah Ferris, Manu Raju, CNNOctober 26, 2025 at 5:30 PM
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People attend a healthcare protest outside the US Capitol on September 30, the eve of the government shutdown. - Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Fair Share America/File
Anxiety is rising among congressional Republicans that their party has no plan to address a critical health care deadline this fall that will result in spiking costs for millions of Americans – the issue at the heart of the deepening government shutdown crisis.
And some of those GOP members are offering a stark warning to their own leaders: Doing nothing could cost them their full control of Congress in next November’s midterms, calling for a plan that would address expiring enhanced Obamacare tax credits to be swiftly advanced once the government eventually reopens.
“I think the reality is, if costs go up under our control, it could have an impact on us,” Rep. David Valadao, a vulnerable GOP lawmaker from California, told CNN about the political effects of the health care fight. “I get that there’s some in leadership who don’t like hearing it but there’s no denying it.”
“Just watching rates go up and pointing fingers is not what we should be doing in our position,” he said.
Valadao is among dozens of rank-and-file House and Senate members who have begun drafting their own ideas about how to deal with the expiring enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, which help millions of Americans afford insurance. Many of those GOP members — predominantly from battleground seats — are also directly urging their leadership and the White House to do something to make sure the tax credits keep flowing at year’s end.
Democrats have made extending the subsidies central to their demands in the shutdown fight, blocking a dozen attempts by Senate Republicans to pass a House bill to reopen the government until November 21 until there’s an agreement on health care. Most of these at-risk Republicans are in lockstep with the GOP leadership position that there should be no negotiations until after Democrats vote to reopen the government.
Some, though, are calling for a change in course.
“I think it’s time for both Republicans and Democrats to be sitting down together to talk about, how do we end this impasse?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Alaska Republican, said
Asked if President Donald Trump should begin to get directly involved to end the impasse, something he has resisted so far, Murkowski said: “That would certainly help.”
“I think everyone recognizes that the president plays a very significant role in something like a shutdown,” she said.
Party leaders are keenly aware of the pressure.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune speaks to reporters alongside Senate Republican Leadership outside of the West Wing of the White House on October 21. - Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Inside the US Capitol this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune sat down with a small group of senators to discuss potential solutions to the problem. One participant said the session amounted to touching gloves so that when Democrats end the shutdown, Republicans are positioned and prepared to negotiate on the health care issues that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his party are demanding.
“I go to bed at night thinking about health care. Of course, I’m always thinking about what we can do to find a solution,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican of Louisiana who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said as he left the meeting. “I say that but it’s more pointed forward, because we need Schumer to open the government.”
Still, as a critical deadline approaches on November 1, when open enrollment launches, Trump and the GOP have no consensus on how to handle the issue.
Republicans are in a bind: GOP leaders have shut down any talk about how to handle the subsidies during the funding fight, since Democrats have put those subsidies at the center of their demands. But the unexpectedly long stalemate has prevented Republicans from working through a solution on what is one of the diciest issues in Washington at the moment – especially since extending the subsidies even in the short-term could cost tens of billions of dollars.
It’s not clear how long that position can hold. Several prominent Republicans close to Trump — from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley — have been increasingly vocal in their warnings that failing to act will cause pain for millions of Trump voters.
“If we don’t do anything their premiums are gonna almost double. They’re too high right now. We’re talking about working people,” Hawley said. “So it’s just, we’ve got to do something. This is totally unaffordable.”
Some members, including GOP Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, have made their case directly to Trump, arguing to him that the party’s own working class voters rely on that money to pay their health care coverage. In a recent phone call with Trump, Van Drew told CNN that the president made clear “he doesn’t want to hurt people.”
“His concern is, is there something better we can do?” Van Drew said.
In response, the New Jersey Republican told Trump there was but that he’s worried it’d take too long for a fix, telling the president: “I don’t think we’re going to get it done in a matter of weeks.”
Van Drew added that he agrees with Greene’s recent attacks against their own party for lacking a plan on an issue that impacts working class voters. If Republicans fail to find a solution, the New Jersey Republican warned: “It’s morally bankrupt not to do it and it is politically stupid.”
The US Capitol on October 23. - Eric Lee/Getty Images
Yet the fate of that policy is highly uncertain in the GOP, especially in the House. House Republican leaders are privately skeptical that their sharply divided party can agree to an Obamacare extension this year, and believe any overhaul would be hard to accomplish in just a few weeks, according to multiple people involved in those discussions.
Some in GOP leadership are doubtful that those spiking premiums – which are set to more than double nationally, according to KFF – will be the dominant issue in the elections next November. And they know they could face a rebellion from their right flank over any votes on the Affordable Care Act.
“I think it’s an issue where everybody realizes we have to do something,” one congressional GOP campaign operative said, while noting that Republicans will likely need major changes to get support from across the conference. “It’s a trigger for the base, hearing ‘Obamacare.’”
Some House conservatives, meanwhile, are calling for dramatic overhauls of the program that would be unlikely to get Democratic support.
“The whole thing is a nightmare and I think we better ought to look at redoing this thing,” said Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who said he does not support simply extending the enhanced subsidies. “I want to make sure whatever we do has some fiscal soundness to it.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, predicted that Americans would be “screaming bloody murder” at the cost to the US economy if Congress agrees to simply extend the subsidies.
He acknowledged that ending enhanced ACA tax credits would make premiums for his constituents increase, but he lamented that former President Obama’s signature health care law has “ruined our health care system” and attempting to subsidize costs for those in need has “really put us in harm’s way.”
Still, other Republicans are willing to consider an extension – including Sen. David McCormick, a Pennsylvania freshman who suggested he’d back setting stricter income limits on which families stand to benefit from the subsidies.
“But certainly I’m worried about working families and what the premium expenses are going to mean to them,” McCormick said in an interview.
Even the Republicans who do support a short-term extension have made clear they would not support it indefinitely. They want to see major reforms to the Obamacare marketplace, which they argue is being propped up by billions of dollars of federal subsidies.
“We’ve got to address this in the immediate term,” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told CNN, who backs a short-term extension because he wants to “make sure people don’t see a sticker shock.”
“We don’t want to see people’s health care premiums rise, and Republicans, writ large, want to reduce the cost of health care. Nobody is disputing that. I think the question you know is, how do you go about that,” he said, stressing that he wants to see major changes in future years to those subsidies.
CNN’s Ted Barrett and Alison Main contributed to this report.
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