November 14, 2025 07:32 AM UTC

Will Jeff Hurd Put His Signature Where His Mouth Is?

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• by: Colorado Pols

As FOX 31’s Jacob Factor reports, now that the government has re-opened without a deal to prevent massive health insurance premium hikes mandated by the Republican “We’re All Going To Die” budget bill passed this summer, House Democrats are loading up a discharge petition to force a House vote on extending the premium subsidies like the one promised in the Senate as part of the high controversial cave-in by a faction of Senate Democrats that ended the shutdown:

The Senate majority leader agreed to a December vote on the tax credits in exchange for eight Democrats approving the federal funding bill without the extension of the credits.

No such agreement exists in the House, though, as Speaker Mike Johnson has not committed to a vote on the credits, so House Democrats on Wednesday night after the shutdown vote introduced a petition to try and force a House vote on extending the tax credits.

While not all Democrats have signed on yet, and they would need several Republicans to also sign it, all four Colorado congressional Democrats are among more than 100 House Democrats who have so far signed the petition.

This is not an initiative without hope, as there are Republicans who have expressed support for extending the premium subsidies to prevent the sudden huge increase millions of Americans are being notified about right now. In Colorado, as readers know, freshman GOP Rep. Jeff Hurd is a co-sponsor of a bill that would do so for one year. But when asked about the Democratic discharge petition, Hurd was noncommittal:

Certainly, the politics of it are one issue, but doing what’s right is important for me. My district is in southern and western Colorado. It’s half of the state; it’s very rural. The cost of healthcare is a top issue. We need to address the short-term issue; that’s the cost of premiums. That’s what the enhance premium tax credit would do, but in the long term we need to get back to, ‘what are those things that are pushing up the Affordable Care Act costs?’ The Affordable Care Act did expand coverage, but it did a terrible job of keeping healthcare affordable. We need, as Republicans, as Democrats in the Senate and the House, to work together on lowering those healthcare costs for our constituents.

That’s all well and good, but the question the House will soon be confronted with on extending the premium tax credits before massive hikes break thousands of Hurd’s constituents financially is not an over-the-horizon hypothetical. Americans need help now and more affordable care in the future, and Hurd can’t ignore the former with empty promises to address the latter at some unspecified future date.

The simple fact is that if the cuts to premium subsidy tax credits that Hurd and fellow Republicans voted for in the budget bill are allowed to take effect, millions of Americans will take a devastating financial hit, hundreds of thousands will be forced to go uninsured, and some number of those people will get sick and die as a direct preventable result. While fellow Republicans like Rep. Gabe Evans have turned to disparaging the tax credits as needless largesse to people who “don’t need it,” Jeff Hurd pretends to know better.

The best way for Hurd to prove he knows better is to join Democrats in ensuring the subsidies get another vote.

An apology for voting for the cuts to begin with would also be nice.