Letter: Permanent emergencies aren’t policy – InForum

The debate over extending the enhanced COVID-era premium tax credits is really a debate about whether emergency policy should become permanent.

Ending these temporary subsidies isn’t cutting healthcare; it’s restoring the Affordable Care Act to its original structure as enacted by Congress. The ACA functioned for years without these add-ons, and returning to that baseline is not a radical move; it’s a matter of simple policy integrity, albeit a poor overall policy.

There’s also a basic economic truth at stake. When the federal government subsidizes anything — housing, energy, higher education, or healthcare — it drives prices upward. Massive federal subsidies don’t make services cheaper; they make them more insulated from market discipline.

Healthcare is no exception. By shielding consumers from the true cost of coverage, subsidies allow insurers, major hospital systems and intermediaries to raise prices with little consequence.

Continuing to extend these tax credits only fuels this inflationary cycle. It masks the real price of healthcare, forces citizens and employers to shoulder an ever-growing burden and keeps the industry dependent on Washington instead of innovation and competition. The result is predictable: higher premiums, higher spending and no incentive for the system to change.

At some point, the status quo becomes too expensive to sustain, and perhaps we are finally nearing that moment. Instead of repeatedly propping up a broken model, policymakers should confront the actual drivers of healthcare costs — consolidation, regulation, labor shortages/productivity, opaque pricing and misaligned incentives.

Real reform comes from fixing the production side of healthcare, not subsidizing its dysfunction.

But if Congress is determined to keep extending COVID-era subsidies indefinitely, then maybe we should fully embrace this logic. Why stop with premium tax credits? Let’s bring back the Paycheck Protection Program, the ARPA slush funds and every other temporary pandemic program.

If Washington insists we live in perpetual COVID times, we might as well resurrect all the COVID policies, because apparently, emergency measures are now a permanent governing philosophy.

Christopher Jones is a former senior advisor to Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Jones is a resident of Bismarck.

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