With a deal to revive the enhanced Obamacare subsidies hopelessly out of reach, Congress is beginning to turn the page.
Lawmakers are taking narrow health care wins where they can get them — for example, adding bipartisan measures to a must-pass government funding bill this week rather than waiting for a grand bargain on Obamacare subsidies. Meanwhile, Republicans are turning their focus back to some of the more partisan ideas to address surging health costs, including what President Donald Trump proposed last week.
“It’s turned out to be more challenging than I think we thought at the beginning,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, who’s been involved in the Senate talks to renew expired Obamacare subsidies. Durbin views an agreement as “possible but not likely.”
The road ahead: The latest setback came this week when lawmakers agreed to a separate, narrow health care deal as part of the final FY2026 government funding package. It’s silent on the enhanced ACA premium tax credits.
The health committees have long sought to move a package along these lines, which includes measures to crack down on pharmacy benefit managers. It’s heavily bipartisan.
Tucking the PBM reforms into the broader funding package is the latest evidence that an Obamacare subsidy deal isn’t happening.
The Senate is scheduled to return on Monday but the bipartisan negotiating group is not currently planning to meet.
Remember, the House passed a three-year clean extension of the Obamacare credits and a narrow package of GOP health care bills. But neither have a path forward in the Senate.
Now House GOP moderates are looking at other options to tackle high costs, although this is problematic as well. Republicans would likely need to use the partisan reconciliation process to pass significant proposals, and it’s not clear the GOP can unite behind another large bill.
“The objective is to address the short-term issue of the subsidies but the larger, longer-term issue of health care costs in America is the biggest priority,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told us.
Inside the abortion fight. The clash over adding new language to restrict abortion funding has long been the biggest obstacle for the bipartisan Obamacare subsidy group.
Durbin credited Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) with pushing behind the scenes to strike a compromise on the abortion language. Sullivan and other Republicans tried to argue to their GOP colleagues that they should be amenable to more generic language that doesn’t expand abortion services, Durbin said.
Sullivan is on the ballot this year, so his push is a sign of the political potency of the health care issue that Democrats have been spotlighting since Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill. Sullivan even voted to advance Democrats’ proposal in December, which was a three-year extension of the Obamacare subsidies. Sullivan now has a formidable Democratic challenger in former Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska).
But the more generic language on abortion that Sullivan and other Republicans have been pushing has been a tough sell for conservatives.
And Democrats, according to Durbin, have been skeptical of even that language because, “if it doesn’t change anything, why do you need this language?”
“It’s kind of hard to find the sweet spot in the middle,” Durbin added.
