November 25, 2025 | Yuval Levin

Two weeks ago, I suggested around here that the general sense that the Democrats had badly lost the government shutdown fight could turn out to be wrong:

In a confrontation they had no real shot at winning, the Democrats may well turn out to have been quite right to just use the modest leverage they had to change the subject to health care, even without the prospect of any substantive gains in the near term. After all, Republicans haven’t gained anything either. They are left with a few more months of Biden-era spending levels and another health-care debate they have no idea how to win.

That does look to be how things are going at this point. Republicans are unsure how to proceed regarding the expiring Covid-era Obamacare subsidies, and that uncertainty is revealing two kinds of problems they have sought to obscure all year.

The first is just the sheer absence of any Republican health care agenda, which has been a persistent problem for more than a decade now. Republicans have honed the habit of starting sentences they can’t finish when it comes to health care, promising all sorts of action if only they could get the leverage to advance it, but then turning out to have no particular policies in mind — or at least none they agree about.

In this instance, the administration’s proposal (which built on ideas advanced by several Republican senators) was basically to extend the existing subsidies with a few more constraints. They wanted subsidies available only for households that make up to about $225,000 a year (!), for instance, and they treated that as a substantively significant health care reform. But it’s really just a trimming of the status quo. Republicans aren’t pursuing any kind of different direction on health care policy, and it’s not because they don’t have the votes to advance one but because they don’t have any generally agreed-on ideas to advance.

Now, to be fair, the Democrats have no reform ideas either. They seem untroubled by the utter economic irrationality of Obamacare, as they have been from the start. And their response to the fact that the system has turned out to be so dysfunctional that it can only persist by heavily subsidizing families that earn almost three times the median income is just to fund those subsidies (and not even limit them by income at all). But the Democrats don’t pretend to be troubled by the cost of all this, and so they aren’t tying themselves in knots about it.

The second problem revealed by the Republican fight over health care is one the GOP has been even more eager to obscure this year. It is the great and growing frustration with the Trump administration among congressional Republicans.