Key Vote Alert – Senate – “NO” on Extension of Biden-era Covid Subsidies

Scott Parkinson  |   December 9, 2025

The Club for Growth urges all Senators to vote NO on the plan to extend the Biden-era COVID subsidies by 3 years. The results of this vote will be included in the Club for Growth Foundation’s 2025 congressional scorecard.

Senate Democrats forced a shutdown of the federal government for 43 days. They said it was to get an extension of the Biden-era COVID subsidies. After the results of the 2025 elections, Democrats agreed to re-open government in exchange for a vote on extending the Biden-era COVID subsidies. This is not a policy issue for them, it is a political battle and they’re setting the stage for this to be an electoral issue in 2028. Club for Growth opposes any extension of the Biden-era COVID subsidies.

In 2008, the national average health insurance premium for a family of four was about $13,000. Then President Obama and Democrats in Congress passed the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA), which did nothing to make premiums affordable and instead required healthy people to subsidize the costs of sick people. Premiums soared. Today, that same national average for a family of four’s health insurance premiums has more than doubled to about $27,000.

President Biden presided over a massive increase in health insurance costs and tried to alleviate the cost paid by employers and employees by enhancing subsidies during COVID. But the subsidies were a taxpayer funded financial transaction paid directly to health insurance companies and premiums continued to soar without accountability or transparency. The Biden-era COVID subsidies, also known as the enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits expire at the end of 2025. The Democrats’ proposals is to extend these subsidies for 3 years.

BUT COVID IS OVER. And we are never going back.

While many policymakers are considering what to do to help Americans deal with the affordability crisis Democrats created, conservatives have a better solution than a continued taxpayer-funded subsidization of health insurance costs which has failed to control premium increases.

We will cut average premiums by 40-50% after Congress implements Club for Growth alternative plans to:

  1. Allow the Biden era COVID subsidies to completely expire at the end of 2025.
  2. Execute President Trump’s principle that federal dollars should follow patients, not insurance companies, through Trump-style Health Freedom Accounts and a broad HSA expansion so patients can save, shop, and benefit directly from lower prices.
  3. Provide price transparency via the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act and the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act, making prices visible across hospitals, insurers, and prescription drug middlemen.
  4. Allow insurance purchases across state lines, injecting competition into markets that are now stubbornly highly concentrated.
  5. Implement modern high-risk pools and targeted reinsurance programs to protect the sick without destroying market incentives and forcing healthy people to subsidize sick people.
  6. Restore and strengthen short-term limited-duration insurance (STLDI) and association health plans (AHPs) as lower-cost alternatives.
  7. Abolish the Obamacare Medicaid Expansion for non-citizens, able bodied individuals, and fix the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) to match the traditional Medicaid population rate.

 

Club for Growth Foundation’s Congressional Scorecard for the 119th Congress provides a comprehensive rating of how well or how poorly each member of Congress supports pro-growth, free-market policies and will be distributed to the public.