Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) is Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Photo courtesy of @GettyImages. 

The government shutdown ended with a failure to solve the problem of steeply rising health insurance premiums. As a result, millions of Americans who receive health insurance through government insurance marketplaces will see their health insurance premiums double (or more). Democrats demanded a fix for the problem, but ultimately ended the shutdown without one.

But in the midst of the shutdown, Senators were still busy. They approved a $32 billion increase for the Pentagon on a bipartisan basis, approving the increase by a vote of 77-20 as part of a larger bill, the National Defense Authorization Act.

The same Senators couldn’t agree to extend healthcare subsidies by even a single year to save millions of people from devastating premium increases. The price tag for a single year of extending the subsidies would be about $35 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. 

Now, millions of Americans are now facing decisions about how, or whether, to maintain their health insurance given the huge price increases they face. Senators agreed to a vote on a possible solution, but there’s no such agreement in the House of Representatives - making any solution highly unlikely. 

The Senate’s $32 billion increase comes on top of the previously passed $156 billion increase from the president’s Big Bad Bill. That already promised to push military spending over the $1 trillion mark. 

The Senate’s additional $32 billion adds insult to injury. While approving that money - much of which would go to shipbuilding and buying more F-35s – the Senate also defeated amendments that would require military and law enforcement to display clear identification when conducting crowd control, and one that would have required Congressional approval for domestic military deployments for law enforcement purposes after 30 days. Apparently, even the lowest bars for accountability for Trump’s Pentagon were too high. 

But it’s not over. Now, the House and Senate also need to reconcile their Pentagon funding levels. While that will likely happen behind closed doors, members of Congress will still be receptive to calls from their constituents. It’s not too late to defeat that $32 billion. 

And then, we can get to work using that money to save health care subsidies and keep millions of Americans from losing health insurance.