WASHINGTON, D.C. – Four new bipartisan lawmakers have cosponsored Congressmen Kiley (R-CA) and Liccardo’s (D-CA) Fix It Act. Congressmen Jefferson Van Drew (R-NJ), Adam Gray (D-CA), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), and Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) now join the solution with the most bipartisan support for a two-year extension. 

The Fix It Act is currently the only proposal to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that would reduce the deficit—saving taxpayers a net $90 billion over the next decade, while constraining the skyrocketing health care premiums for tens of millions of Americans.

“The Fix It Act is about making sure people don’t lose their insurance while we work to reform a system that clearly isn’t working,” said Van Drew. “We need to extend coverage and take the time to build something better and more affordable. This bill helps us do that.”

“In the Central Valley and across the country, families are facing skyrocketing health care costs,” said Gray. “This is bipartisan, commonsense legislation to safeguard affordable care and ensure ACA subsidies don’t lapse. We must work together to prevent needless price hikes on hardworking families.”

“The cost of health care is skyrocketing and South Texans need immediate relief,” added Gonzalez. “I am pleased to join a bipartisan group of colleagues committed to finding commonsense solutions that will ensure families can afford the care they need and never have to take extreme actions like rationing medications, skipping a doctor’s visit, or forgoing health care altogether.”

Representatives Don Bacon (R-NE), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Deborah Ross (D-NC), Zach Nunn (R-IA), Mike Lawler (R-NY), and Ro Khanna (D-CA) have also cosponsored the legislation.

The Fix It Act
If approved by Congress, the Fix It Act will preserve access to affordable health care for tens of millions of Americans, by extending the Affordable Care Act Premium Tax
Credits for two years while reducing the fiscal burden on our taxpayers. A two-year
extension would have an aggregate cost of $55.3 billion, according to the Bipartisan
Policy Center. Here’s how we’ll pay for it:

  1. Identify Savings By Narrowing the Focus to the Working & Middle Class
    By capping eligibility at six times the poverty level, or $192,900 for a family of
    four, this measure will save approximately $5 billion over two years.
  2. Crack Down on Upcoding in Medicare Advantage
    The Act would achieve its greatest savings by cracking down on excessive
    Medicare Advantage payouts to insurers. Medicare Advantage serves more than half of the Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S., paying private health insurers for each beneficiary they enroll. The reimbursements are based on the health of the patient, creating perverse incentives for insurers to secure higher reimbursements by associating inflated risk scores to relatively healthy patients. By “upcoding” patients–i.e., inflating diagnoses, or perpetuating diagnoses of long-resolved maladies—insurance companies can reap large windfalls. Those overpayments from CMS to Medicare Advantage cost taxpayers $50 billion in 2024. By adopting the language of the No UPCODE Act, authored by Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy and Democrat Jeff Merkeley, this bill would require CMS to use two years of diagnostic data to calculate risk scores, and exclude older diagnoses from health risk assessments. According to the CBO, the No UPCODE Act–supported by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)– would save approximately $15 to 20 billion each year after the initial ramp-up, or $124 billion over ten years.
  3. Stop Fraud by Insurance Brokers in the Program
    In recent years, we’ve seen numerous reports of unscrupulous brokers
    generating commissions by fraudulently signing up ineligible ACA applicants. Between January 2024 and August 2024, CMS received 183,553 complaints of unauthorized enrollments, and 90,863 complaints of unauthorized switching of plans sold on the FFM. The Insurance Fraud Accountability Act, introduced by Congresswomen Deborah Ross and Kathy Castor (and Ron Wyden in the Senate), would impose new civil and criminal penalties for agents and brokers who submit false ACA applications. It also would create a consent verification process for new enrollments and coverage changes, and require plan marketers to register with the state, and bolster consumer protections. The Fix It Act adopts the entirety of the IFAA, producing additional billions–though as-yet
    unquantified–savings.