Republicans have to do absolutely nothing to stop the expansion of a program they once ran on repealing. It would be a disgrace to miss that very low bar. 

Somewhere, Barack Obama and Joe Biden must be laughing. This morning brings a worrisome report by our own Audrey Fahlberg, from an interview with Senator Ron Johnson, on his efforts to prevent Republicans from caving into Democratic demands to expand Obamacare:

“Hopefully we can convince the president and others we can’t do that,” Johnson said, with a hint of resignation about how this will end. “I know people like me are vastly outnumbered here.” 

As a reminder, the raft of regulations created by the national health-care law led premiums to skyrocket. Rather than address the underlying flaws with Obamacare that triggered this problem, Democrats chose to throw tens of billions more dollars at the problem. Two times during the Biden administration, Democrats voted to expand subsidies for the purchase of insurance. But those enhancements were supposed to be temporary and are slated to expire at the end of this year. That should be the end of them. Unfortunately, there are some Republicans who are afraid to be called scary names by Democrats during an election year, and they may succeed in convincing leadership to go along with extending the program. This would be catastrophic.

Republicans ran on repealing Obamacare for four straight election cycles (2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016) and then failed to do so when they got control of all three branches of government. Even though President Trump was willing to sign any version of health-care legislation that Republicans could have passed in 2017, they failed to do so, because senators like John McCain, who had voted for much more aggressive repeal bills during the Obama administration, got cold feet.

But back then, Republicans had the difficult task of uniting their disparate caucus around not just a bill to repeal Obamacare but getting them to agree on some sort of comprehensive health-care reform to replace it. Depending on whom you talked to, the various proposals either went too far or not far enough. They should have gotten the job done, but it was admittedly a heavy lift.  In this case, there is no heavy lift. In fact, there is no lift at all. Republicans simply have to do absolutely nothing. It would be a disgrace if they fail at meeting that very low bar.

Republicans, no doubt, will attempt to sell any compromise as a temporary, one-year extension, to make it seem less ominous to conservatives. But let’s get real — if they don’t have the wherewithal to sit on their hands and let it expire now, they never will. So any vote for extending these subsidies should be treated as the equivalent of a permanent expansion of Obamacare, which would cost $350 billion over a decade, per the CBO.

The ramifications go far beyond that, however, because Republicans will have reset the health-care spending baseline. At the time it was passed, those on the left were frustrated that Obamacare didn’t go further, and Democratic leaders sold the health-care legislation as a “starter home” that could be built on over time — which is exactly what has happened with incremental expansions such as this one. With the super-sized subsidies already baked into the cake, Democrats would be able to expand Obamacare even further once they take power, creeping closer toward their ultimate goal of a complete government takeover of the American health-care system. Republican surrender on the health-care issue will also further embolden them, convincing them that whatever radical steps they take, no matter how loudly Republicans scream about them, ultimately they will chicken out and go along with everything. If Republicans follow the lead of the so-called moderates (and I say so-called because there is nothing “moderate” about hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit spending), a few decades from now we’ll be reduced to arguing over whether our socialized health system should offer free transgender surgeries for minors while our economy is undergoing a fiscal crisis.

I know that the Republican Party has evolved since its Tea Party days, but if there is still a shred of that fighting spirit, they need to snuff out any talk of expanding Obamacare.