Fitzpatrick offers health care tax credit extension as deadline looms

A slate of eight bipartisan Congress members, including U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick has introduced a bill to extend health care tax credits.

These tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2025, which could impact hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians if passed.

The Bucks County lawmaker called the Bipartisan Health Insurance Affordability Act introduced in the House on Dec. 9 a “bipartisan solution” in an ongoing battle over affordable health insurance. But the bill also appears to reform parts of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits that roughly 500,000 Pennsylvanians currently benefit from.

“From the outset, I committed to delivering a bipartisan solution to prevent devastating premium spikes — today, we are doing exactly that,” Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Middletown, said in a news release Dec. 9. “Our bill keeps the ACA’s premium tax credits in place, so families are not blindsided with unaffordable increases in the care they depend on.”

U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2010 signature health care law included tax credits to help lower costs, but members of Congress temporarily increased those subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If those pandemic-era extensions sunset, the ACA premium tax credits will go back to their smaller, original amounts.

Members of the Center for American Progress Action Fund estimate that premiums could rise by more than 200% on average for Pennsylvanians in 2026, with coverage costing $279 today rising to $860 next year.

Republican U.S. Reps. Don Bacon, R-NE, Rob Bresnahan R-PA  and Nicole Malliotakis, R-NY, and Democratic U.S. Reps. Jared Golden, D-ME, Tom Suozzi, D-NY, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-WA, and Donald G. Davis, D-NC, joined Fitzpatrick in the bill that offers five key provisions.

This bill includes the tax credit extensions, but also would require consumer consent before any plan or subsidy changes could take effect; “ends hidden pricing” by severing Pharmacy Benefit Manager profits from drug prices; and expands access to Health Savings Accounts.

The news release also says the bill “modernizes eligibility” and introduces “a reasonable minimum contribution to protect long-term affordability and responsible stewardship of federal dollars.”

The bill came the same week that Fitzpatrick told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he was willing to use a discharge petition to force a vote if House Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t allow it to come to a vote.

Similar to the recent release of files related to the investigation into deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, a discharge petition with 218 signatures from House members would call the question.

House Democrats currently have a discharge petition that would extend the tax credits for three years. This effort includes no Republicans among its 214 signatures.

Fitzpatrick’s absence from one petition while floating another drew criticism from Democrats looking to unseat the five-term Congressman in the 2026 midterms.

Democratic Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, Fitzpatrick’s most likely challenger so far, called on Fitzpatrick to “put up or shut up” earlier this month and sign the petition from Democrats.

“Hardworking Pennsylvanians are about to see their health care premiums skyrocket and it’s because of Washington politicians like Fitzpatrick who are playing games instead of actually doing anything to lower costs,” Harvie said in a news release Dec. 3.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Eli Cousins also pushed for Fitzpatrick’s “common sense” support for the party’s petition.

“The fact that Fitzpatrick is refusing to do so shows he is more interested in playing political games than actually doing anything to help Bucks and Montgomery County families,” Cousins said.

Fitzpatrick has been critical of the ACA since his first term in office in 2017, arguing that the 2010 law is “broken in many areas” in need of being fixed or replaced entirely while also opposing “attempts to dismantle” the law that made health insurance more affordable and accessible to people with pre-existing conditions.

Fitzpatrick previously voted along party lines against large bills that originally instituted and then extended the higher ACA subsidies.

But Fitzpatrick has advocated for other health care cost relief measures in recent years.

In 2022, he was one of just 12 House Republicans voting to pass caps on insulin prices. And Fitzpatrick said this summer that he supported extending the Obamacare subsidies and that he was working on legislation to do so.