In January, the House will at last vote on a bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years, fulfilling a goal that House Democrats have been working towards for months – and they accomplished it thanks to four Republicans who crossed the aisle to support a Democratic-led petition on the issue.
The approximately 450,000 New Jerseyans who are set to see their health care costs rise without the credits, though, are still likely looking at a premium hike, since House GOP leaders declined to hold the vote before the credits expire at the end of the year. And even if the House does pass the three-year extension bill, it faces a tough fight in the Senate, which already rejected the exact same proposal once before.
New Jersey Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) and Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) had both been vocal in pushing for the credits to be extended, but neither were among the four Republicans who signed the discharge petition, a mechanism that forces a bill onto the House floor if it gets 218 signatures. Van Drew said that while he supported more limited expansion efforts, he opposes the Democratic bill, which called he overbroad and lacking in sufficient guardrails.
“I said from the very beginning that I wouldn’t vote for it,” Van Drew said. “This bill is not decent. It’s an insult to the American public.”
Kean, on the other hand, has not commented on the bill, nor did his office provide an answer on where the congressman stands. (The fact that he did not sign the petition is not dispositive of anything, since the petition couldn’t accept any more signatures after the four Republicans joined 214 Democrats in signing it.)
New Jersey’s other Republican congressman, Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester), also did not respond to questions about where he stands on the bill, though he was less involved in the efforts to extend the credits than Kean and Van Drew.
Regardless of how the ACA fight shakes out, it’s likely to be a top subject in next year’s midterm elections. especially in highly competitive districts like Kean’s. Two New Jersey Democrats, Reps. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) and Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), are already trying to hold their colleagues to account.
“Even though Congressmen Kean and Van Drew both said they support extending ACA premium tax credits they did nothing to back it up,” Pallone said in a statement. “These credits expire at the end of the year and signing the discharge petition forces Speaker Johnson to schedule a vote. Unfortunately, Kean and Van Drew broke their promise to lower the cost of health care for New Jersey families.”
The ACA subsidy cliff has been a hot topic in Congress all year, so much so that Democrats refused to fund the government for a month and a half in order to demand a solution. The shutdown eventually ended when a critical handful of Senate Democrats relented in exchange for the promise of an ACA vote, but when that vote occurred, Senate Republicans simply blocked the Democrats’ three-year extension bill from passing. (Democrats, in turn, blocked a Republican health care proposal that didn’t touch the ACA credits.)
Over in the House, GOP leaders similarly drafted a health care bill that didn’t address the ACA issue; it passed on Wednesday, but no Democrats supported it.
Two bipartisan groups of House members – one of them co-led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) – also put forward compromise proposals that would have extended the ACA credits, but for shorter periods of time and with new limitations in place. Van Drew and Kean were both co-sponsors of the Gottheimer bill, and Van Drew signed discharge petitions for both bipartisan bills.
Democrats, though, held off on signing either bipartisan petition en masse – and their calculation paid off when the four Republicans defected to support their own three-year bill. But even though his own bill may be left behind, Gottheimer said he’s “very optimistic” about the possibility of getting the House and Senate on board with the Democratic bill.
“My goal was always to actually get the ACA tax credits extended and help people with their coverage,” Gottheimer said. “Anything we can do to keep the pressure on to get these tax credits extended is a win, and so we’ve just kept moving it and working it.”
