Rep. Jason Smith, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures, that if Republicans agree to extend Obamacare health insurance subsidies, it is a signal that they will never get the budget under control.
“If we’re not able to allow a COVID-era program to expire and revert back to the original Obamacare, which the Democrats have championed from day one, to be able to balance our budget, to cut spending will be virtually impossible,” he said.
It would be to buy some time to be able to move forward with some of the changes that Republicans want to make to the overall system. Walk me through how all of this is going to work.
REP. JASON SMITH (R-MO): Absolutely. First off, it’s great to be with you, Jackie. What Republicans are looking at is how to bring down the cost of health care for all Americans, how to bring down the premiums for all Americans and creating more access for all Americans.
Unfortunately, what the Democrats have been focused on is just the Obamacare exchanges, which is just 7 percent of the entire population, 24 million Americans. And when you look at Obamacare, you can see all the fraud that’s within it.
Just think about this. Last year, in ’24, of the 24 million people on the Obamacare exchanges, 12 million did not even have one medical claim. Are you telling me that those 12 million Americans were that healthy and never went to the doctor?
The simple fact is, they clearly didn’t even know that they had health insurance.
But guess what? Those insurance companies, they sure were subsidized from the federal government.
DEANGELIS: Well, let’s talk about the cost of this, because if it goes on for another year, it would cost anywhere from $38 billion to $40 billion.
You have got Democrats that want to make these subsidies — by the way, the subsidies implemented in 2021 after COVID and after the crisis, but under that cloak of COVID, they want to make those permanent. The 10-year cost would be anywhere from $335 billion to $383 billion, according to some of the estimates.
Why would you throw good money after bad, versus trying to look at how to reform the system to make it work? President Trump, talking about the insurers, said: “Don’t give any money to the insurance companies. Give it to the people directly. Let them go out, buy their own health care plan. We are looking at that.” How much of a reality is it?
SMITH: You know, we’re looking at every option.
But if you just look at Obamacare, it is absolutely unaffordable. Premiums have gone up 80 percent since Obamacare was passed; 150 different hospitals have closed since Obamacare was passed. We have to do things differently.
And the answer is not a COVID era program that was created in ’21.
This — we need to look at some real, real reforms, real changes. Even with it expiring at the end of the year, 93 percent of all the people on Obamacare will still have very generous subsidies; 7 percent will lose it. But that 7 percent are people who are above 400 percent of the federal poverty level.
Right now, there’s folks being subsidized making $600,000 a year.
DEANGELIS: Yes, it’s outrageous when you really think about it and that there’s a lot of waste in the system as well.
But we’re talking about a crisis of affordability. That’s what the Democrats are talking about. President Trump is talking about it too and what he’s done to tackle it. But the Democrats are using that to win elections.
And this is really a hot-button issue, because if, all of a sudden, the average person sees their premium go from roughly a little bit less than $900 a year to almost $1,600 a year because these subsidies go away, that’s a problem on both sides. And both sides will have to attack it differently.
The Democrats will say how awful the Republicans were to take that money away from the American people. You will make the arguments that you have laid out here. The bottom line is that something’s got to get done. It’s got to get done in roughly 30 days.
SMITH: We absolutely make sure we have to be the adult in the room. We have to have real reforms.
If you look at the Big Beautiful Bill that passed on July 4, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the reforms that we put in there of going after folks who are ineligible for different welfare programs and also making sure illegals aren’t receiving welfare programs, we have now resulted in all Americans have lower premiums.
That’s according to the Congressional Budget Office, which is not always the most friendly to House Republican policies. But when you look at affordability, it’s important, Jackie, for people to understand why we are where we’re at today. And that’s because, when Joe Biden and the House Democrats, the Senate Democrats, when they had unified government, they spent more than $10 trillion that led to inflation rising more than 21 percent.
So, to put food on your table, closing your backs and gasoline in your cars cost more. President Trump, in just nine months, in just nine months, has reduced inflation to the lowest level in four years.
But guess what? We need to reverse the damage that Joe Biden.
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If we’re not able to allow a COVID-era program to expire and revert back to the original Obamacare, which the Democrats have championed from day one, to be able to balance our budget, to cut spending will be virtually impossible.
We need to cut spending. We need to grow the economy. We need to eliminate unnecessary regulations. And that’s in fact what President Trump’s been doing. Do you know what? Just nine different executive orders that Joe Biden created when he was president cost more than a trillion dollars to all Americans, a trillion dollars.
But Donald Trump’s been reversing that. And he’s been pushing for more private sector investment. It’s only going to grow the economy and it’s going to bring affordability down.
