The spending deal, DACA and Obamacare (and upcoming elections)

In the comments section of the Illinois election report post below, a discussion has broken out over the omnibus spending bill that Congress passed this week.

First of all, just to keep everyone up to date: President Trump has signed the deal, after threatening earlier to veto it, via Twitter naturally, very possibly after watching Fox & Friends, and apparently to the surprise of his own White House aides and his party's Congressional leadership.  A presidential veto would have triggered a government shutdown.

Russell Berman at The Atlantic website has posted an article which, while noting that the 2,000 page bill has bits and pieces sure to please many constituencies, takes a look at two major opportunities that got away: fixes for DACA and Obamacare.  Given the president's focus on immigration issues, it's perhaps not surprising that a number of news accounts have focused on the DACA negotiations.  But the Obamacare deal, or lack thereof, is interesting in its own right.



DACA: several months ago, President Trump had precipitated a Dreamer crisis by announcing that he would be ending the Obama Administration's DACA program: beginning this month, Dreamers would be eligible for deportation.  So it was expected that the spending-bill deadline that was looming until today and which led to the current round of shutdown brinkmanship would be Congress's last and probably best chance to craft a new deal on the Dreamers, something that Trump had signaled he'd support.  However, a federal court then overturned Trump's executive action to end DACA, extending the program another couple of years at least.  That injunction ended the short-term urgency to fix DACA.  Even so, Congress seems to have made a genuine effort to strike a deal.  Berman reports on the negotiations:

According to a senior Democratic aide, the two parties exchanged a pair of proposals over the last several days.  Republicans initially proposed a three-year extension of protected status for around 700,000 DACA recipients if Democrats would agree to Trump's full request of $25 billion in funding for his southern border wall.  Democrats rejected that and said they would give Trump his $25 billion in exchange for a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers - essentially the same deal that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had offered Trump hours before the government shut down in January. 

Republicans came back with another offer: three years of DACA protections for three years of border-wall funding.  But Democrats stuck to their demand for a path to citizenship for the broader population of 1,8 million, and the talks broke down.

The upshot is that a deal was not reached.


Obamacare: This one is a little more complicated.  Recall that Obamacare subsidizes the health care insurance premiums for most Obamacare enrollees.  The Obama administration had also tacked on another subsidy, called Cost Sharing Reductions, aka "extra savings", that further subsidized some consumers by paying for part of their deductibles, copays and coinsurance (all of which are mechanisms that force the consumer to share the cost of treatment with the insurer).  As I understand it, the federal government reimbursed the health care insurance companies to make them whole for the Cost Sharing Reduction subsidies.

Trump's executive action ended the Cost Sharing Reduction insurance-company subsidies.  It was feared that this would further destabilize the health care marketplaces by forcing insurers to raise premiums to cover their increased costs.  So a bipartisan effort spun up in Congress to restore the Cost Sharing Reduction subsidies via legislation. Susan Collins of Maine, who is as close to liberal as the Republican Party is able to offer these days, supports the Cost Sharing Reductions legislation and insisted that her leadership bring the bill to a vote as a condition for her support for the Republicans' tax reform bill last year.

Republican leadership attempted to keep that pledge by incorporating language that would restore the Cost Sharing Reductions into the omnibus spending bill.  But because many Republicans are opposed to doing anything that helps Obamacare to stay afloat,  Democratic votes would be required to pass an omnibus spending bill that includes Cost Sharing Reductions provisions.  But the Republican leadership made it extremely unlikely that that Democratic support could be rounded up by inserting a poison pill provision as well: it would have also extended Hyde Amendment provisions into Obamacare spending.  This would have the effect of ensuring that the federal government wouldn't subsidize any plan that covered abortions.  In practical terms, this would end the availability of insurance plans that offer abortion services on the Obamacare exchanges.

The result of all this seems to be that any version of the omnibus spending bill that included fixes for Cost Sharing Reductions wouldn't have rounded up sufficient Republican support to pass, while any version that included the Hyde Amendment wouldn't have rounded up sufficient Democratic votes to pass.  So both sets of provisions were kept out of the final bill.  Mutual incriminations ensued.  Whether any communion will be withheld, remains to be seen.

Berman's final point on all this is an important one: Democrats walked away from deals on two topics, DACA and Obamacare, that are important to the party - arguably more important to them than to Republicans.  Why would Democrats do so?  Because Democrats expect to recapture the House, or the Senate, or both, later this year, and would then be in a much stronger position to drive more favorable terms.  Berman points out that's a risk.  I think he's right.