The release of Jeffrey Epstein’s email archives by House Oversight Committee members has quelled the upset in Democratic circles over the shutdown climbdown and returned the focus to what President Donald Trump knew about the late financier’s crimes.
Whether that focus can be sustained is unclear. The House will soon vote to direct the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents, thanks to a discharge petition that collected its 218th vote after four Republicans broke ranks, and Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona was allowed to take her seat after a 50-day delay imposed by Republicans.
However, Senate prospects for an Epstein document dump are murky. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is not obligated to schedule a vote and has not promised to do so. Even if it cleared Congress, Trump would almost surely veto it.
Democrats could try to make Trump’s Epstein stonewalling a midterm election issue, with promises to subpoena documents if they gain control of one or both chambers. After all, overwhelming majorities want the documents released. But focus on Epstein waxes with new developments in the underage sex trafficking case, then subsides as other stories dominate the news cycle.
Trump, of course, often creates his own news cycles. He has a bottomless capacity to shock.
But now he has an opportunity to distract by doing something helpful: alleviating the imminent spike in health insurance costs from the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Politico reports that “White House officials and Republican lawmakers are cognizant” of how health care concerns helped Democrats take the House in the 2018 midterms and “are looking to coalesce around a plan for the future of the health care system.”
Just as before the 2018 midterms, which were disastrous for the GOP, that plan doesn’t exist, but Republicans are considering their options. Per Politico, “Options that administration officials have publicly teased in recent days include giving money directly to Americans to cover health expenses, and subsidizing out-of-pocket costs for low-income people enrolled in the ACA.” Among congressional Republicans, some “support depositing funds into Health Savings Accounts, which can be used more broadly on expenses and roll over year to year, while others would opt for Flexible Savings Accounts, which expire at the end of the year and are narrower.” NBC News reports Republicans are nowhere near an intra-party consensus on what to support. Significantly, both it and Politico note that Trump has not “ruled out” what Democrats want, a simple extension of the expiring enhanced subsidies.
When it comes to policy, an extension is the best approach to address the disparate impacts of the expiring enhanced subsidies. CNN explains that “More than 90% of [ACA’s 24 million] enrollees are receiving premium assistance, which, for roughly half of policyholders, reduces their monthly cost to $0 or near $0.” Because Democrats during the Biden administration lifted income caps for the enhanced subsidy program, expiration hits middle-income households especially hard. Moreover, the Trump administration has already made the formula for the remaining subsidy stingier. The health policy analysts at KFF estimate the combined impact of the expiring enhanced subsidies and the new subsidy formula means a 45-year-old individual with an annual income of $20,000 would pay $420 more in health insurance premiums for the commonly chosen “Silver Plan,” while a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 would pay $22,635 more, more than a quarter of their income.
Trump can be miserly, as evidenced by the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court to deny SNAP benefits, but he’s not averse to government largesse when he thinks it serves his interests. He is generally reluctant to do whatever Democrats want him to do. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer already offered a mere one-year extension for a proposed deal to end the shutdown—enough to help Republicans take the issue off the table for the midterm elections—which Trump rejected.
As he considers his options, Trump must contend with the Republican caucus’s self-styled deficit hawks. They proved willing to rack up more debt by supporting the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in the name of party unity. (Extending the enhanced ACA subsidies would cost about $35 billion a year over 10 years, while the One Big Beautiful Bill will cost about $330 billion a year.) But undoing cuts to the Affordable Care Act may be more than they would swallow.
The political crosscurrents make a bipartisan health care deal unlikely. Yet Trump could still use the health care issue to distract from the Epstein emails about him knowing about “the girls” and spending hours with one. He could offer a half-baked plan that wouldn’t mitigate the price spikes but could provide political cover and help shift blame to the Democrats.
In that scenario, the challenge for Democrats will be to keep it simple. They could argue: Democrats would entirely avert the loss of the subsidies, and Republicans would not. No complex details needed.
Republicans would then find themselves in the unusual position of having to explain the more complex elements of their proposal, without having earned any credibility from the public as genuinely interested in making health care affordable. Quite the opposite, as the One Big Beautiful Bill was hammered for its sharp health care cuts.
Of course, Trump could always distract with all sorts of insane executive orders, proposals, and comments. But no matter what happens with Epstein or any other Trump act, more than 20 million people will soon get socked with much higher health insurance costs that they are unlikely to forget in November. What’s really in Trump’s interest, and what would really distract from Epstein, is solving the looming insurance premium hikes. However, neither he nor his party has proven capable of crafting any significant health care policies, 16 years after declaring war on the Affordable Care Act, let alone thoughtful ones.
