As the GOP faces backlash for shutting the government down over their refusal to keep health health insurance more affordable, congressional Republicans are now insisting they definitely have a plan to fix the health care system—they just won't say what it is.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune both said on Thursday that they, along with President Donald Trump, want to make health care more affordable. Believe them now, they said, despite having made this same promise for over a decade without releasing any ideas other than repealing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
"The president would like to overhaul Obamacare and give people health insurance that is higher quality and more affordable," Thune said Thursday morning on CNBC, without providing specifics on how that would happen.
“We have a lot of ideas on the table. We’ve been trying to advance some of those, and we will in the days ahead,” Johnson said in response to a C-SPAN viewer who asked what Republicans’ ideas are to bring health care costs down. “Health care is a major problem in the country. Everybody acknowledges it. And we're not just talking about it—we're bringing ideas to the table, and there’s many. It takes a long time. I got a 90-minute slideshow I can show you … but trust me, the Republicans are working on this around the clock. We do all the time. We have lots of ideas to do it.
Johnson later added, "There's a lot of improvements that are needed. Obamacare did not do what was promised. … We gotta fix that. In the Big Beautiful Bill … we added lots of provisions, for example, to reform Medicaid.”
First, Johnson's claim that Republicans "reform[ed]" Medicaid whitewashes the truth. Their supposed reforms are expected to kick millions off the Medicaid rolls and hobble rural hospitals and long-term health care facilities that depend on Medicaid funding.
But more than that, why should anyone believe Republicans that they have some magical fix for the health care system when they have been making the same promise for more than 15 years without producing the goods?
Who can forget that Trump, when pressed during the 2024 campaign about what exactly is in his health care plan, said he didn't have anything concrete but instead had "concepts of a plan." Just believe him, guys! He'll have it in two weeks.
The one time Republicans did try to pass a health care plan came in 2017, when Trump was in the White House and Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. Their so-called plan would have kicked tens of millions of people off their insurance and would have made insurance more expensive for people with preexisting conditions. The push to pass the bill failed spectacularly amid massive public outcry.
Ultimately, the fact that the current government shutdown is focusing on health care can be only a good thing for Democrats.
Polls consistently show that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to fix health care. The ACA remains widely popular. And Republicans' health care positions are largely what led the GOP to lose control of the House in 2018, Trump's first midterm election as president.
With health insurance premiums set to more than double on average if the Republican-controlled Congress doesn’t extend expanded subsidies in the next few weeks, it’s not hard to see how health care could become a major issue again in the 2026 midterms—much to the GOP’s chagrin.
Democrats, for their part, are seizing on Republicans' health care lies.
"He doesn’t have a health care plan. Republicans have never had a health care plan—all they do is cut Medicaid, raise health insurance prices, and kick people off of coverage," Rep. Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, wrote in a post on X of Johnson's C-SPAN assertion that Republicans will fix health care.
"It’s been over a decade of nothing but repeal votes and talking points. They’ve had years to figure it out but it's clear Republicans still don't have a plan," Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee wrote in a post on X. "You deserve better than phrases that just sound good, you deserve results. That's what Democrats are fighting for."
As the kids say, no lies detected.
