Press Releases

WASHINGTON — This morning, Speaker Johnson joined Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s Squawk Box to discuss the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act — House Republicans’ bill to lower premium costs for all Americans, increase health care access, expand health care choices, and bring greater transparency to America’s health care system.

Watch Speaker Johnson’s full interview here

On the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act:

What we're going to do today is the first of multiple steps to help not just 7% of Americans, but 100% of Americans actually reduce their premiums, not subsidize insurance companies to raise the premiums but reduce them. And the first of those votes is today. The Lower Premiums for All Americans Act, we're going to have on the floor, and it's going to actually achieve, if it's signed into law, exactly what we're saying.

It has many components, among them are the cost sharing reduction programs, which will reduce all premiums across the board by at least 11%. And by the way, save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. We have the association health plans that'll be a part of this today, which will give more flexibility to small businesses and others and insurers in the marketplace. You've got PBM transparency as a part of this and the choice accounts. So, there'll be a lot more flexibility in the system. Consumers will be able to have more choices, and their costs will go down. We'll also increase access to care through these reforms. Again, this is just the first of many. We're going to do more of this in the first quarter of next year. Republicans are the ones who will fix health care. It is the Democrats who broke it. Remember, when they passed Obamacare, the Unaffordable Care Act, it was 15 years ago now. They promised us that it would enhance care and that premiums would go down for everyone and you'd have more choices. None of that was true. So, we have to fix it. Republicans are the ones with the ideas to do it.

On Democrats lying about health care subsidies and their own broken system:

First of all, the subsidies are not going away. Again, this is an enhanced subsidy on top of the subsidy that everyone already has. And again, even if it had been extended for three years as Hakeem Jeffries proposed with no reforms, these same people who are achieving that and having that enhanced subsidy would only get 5.7% of savings. The point is, everyone's premiums are going up because the Democrats broke the system. The very people who are trying to continue to subsidize it and put more taxpayer dollars on a broken system are the ones that created the mess. We are coming into the middle of that to reform the system, to look at the root causes, the root problems of why everyone's premiums are going up. And yes, that takes a lot of hard work.

It takes a lot of consensus building here, especially at a time when we have razor thin margins and no one on the Democrat side wants to do anything to actually help the problem. They don't want a solution to this. They want an issue for the upcoming election, and they have put all their chips on one slice in the roulette wheel, and their whole game is to try to blame health care costs on Republicans, which is comical when you look at the facts. They are the ones who broke it. They're the ones that continue to add to it. And that's what we're trying to address.