By KEVIN FREKING and LISA MASCARO

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republican leaders are determined to push ahead with a GOP health care bill that excludes efforts to address the soaring monthly premiums millions of Americans will soon endure as pandemic-era tax credits for people who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act expire at year’s end.

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Speaker Mike Johnson had discussed the prospect of allowing more politically vulnerable GOP lawmakers a chance to vote on their amendment that would temporarily extend pandemic-era subsidies for ACA coverage. But after days of private talks, leadership sided with the more conservative wing of the conference, which has assailed the subsidies as propping up a failed ACA marketplace.

“We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve,” Johnson said Tuesday at the Capitol. “In the end, it was not — an agreement wasn’t made.”

The maneuvering surrounding the health care vote all but guarantees that many Americans will see substantially higher insurance costs in 2026. In the Senate, a bipartisan group was still trying to come up with a compromise to extend the subsidies, which fueled this year’s government shutdown. But senators made clear that any potential legislation would likely wait until January, after the holiday break.

Instead, House Republicans will pursue their 100-plus-page health care package that focuses on long-sought GOP proposals designed to expand insurance coverage options for small businesses and the self-employed. A test vote is expected Wednesday.

The Republicans’ package would clamp down on middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers who work to manage drug costs and process claims for insurance plans. The bill would also expand access to what’s referred to as association health plans, which would allow more small businesses and self-employed individuals to band together and purchase health coverage.

An analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the package would decrease the number of people with health insurance by an average of 100,000 per year over a 2027-2035 window, while reducing the federal deficit by $35.6 billion.

Failing to address expiring insurance subsidies ‘political malpractice’

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., blasted the leadership’s decision to not allow for a vote to temporarily extend the health insurance subsidies, saying it amounted to “political malpractice.”

Lawler, who hails from a competitive district, noted that most people who get their health coverage through the Affordable Care Act live in states that President Donald Trump won and said the changes proposed for a temporary extension were “conservative reforms.” He also criticized Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for not pushing Democrats to support a pair of bipartisan extension efforts.

“You have two leaders who are not serious about solving this problem,” Lawler said of Johnson and Jeffries.

Still, the centrist Republicans indicated they would not try to block the Republican leadership’s measure from coming to a vote.

Johnson defended the House GOP’s bill, which includes priorities that Republicans have been working on for several years.

“We have a long list of things that we know will reduce premiums, increase access and quality of care,” Johnson said. “The Democrats have zero ideas, zero concepts and zero legislative plans on anything they’ll propose other than just subsidizing the broken system.”

Democrats said even if the bill passes the House, it will not pass the Senate, where it would need 60 votes and bipartisan support to advance. They said it was not a serious effort to address rising costs.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters following the weekly policy luncheons at the Capitol, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

“Millions will be priced out of their coverage, and those who can still afford it will get less while paying more,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the House Democratic campaign arm. “Republicans are ignoring the pain, the pain we’re seeing across the country for everyday Americans. And make no mistake, it is going to cost them the majority.”

GOP bill focuses on insurance options and cost-sharing

During Trump’s first term, his administration sought to expand access to association health plans that don’t have to offer the full menu of benefits required under current law. The option offers lower premiums for small businesses and self-employed people, but the policies are likely to cover fewer benefits. A federal judge who struck down the administration’s effort in 2018 said the plans were were “clearly an end-run” around consumer protections required by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

The House Republican plan would also restore government funding for cost-sharing reductions, or CSRs, a type of financial help that insurers give to low-income ACA enrollees on silver-level plans that reduces their share of costs like deductibles and copays.

From 2014 until 2017, the federal government reimbursed insurance companies for CSRs — but in 2017, the Trump administration stopped making those payments. To make up for the lost funds, insurance companies hiked premiums for silver-level plans — a complicated move that ended up increasing the financial assistance many enrollees get to help pay for premiums.

As a result, health analysts say that while restoring funding for CSRs would likely bring down silver-level premiums, it could also have the unwelcome ripple effect of increasing many people’s net premiums on bronze and gold plans.

The provisions related to pharmacy benefit managers require the middlemen to disclose certain data about their operations to group health plans, with the hope that more transparency would reduce prescription drug costs.

Senators revive talks of action in the new year

Almost two dozen Republicans and Democrats met late Monday to talk about a last-minute fix on the ACA tax credits after the Senate rejected two partisan health care bills last week. They emerged from the meeting discussing ways to end the stalemate, including a possible two-year extension of the subsidies with reforms that would narrow who could receive them. They also discussed adding some version of a GOP proposal to create new health savings accounts that would help people purchase insurance.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who led the bipartisan meeting, said the group would like to announce a proposal this week. But there were still significant unresolved issues, including whether to include stricter language on abortion funding. Disagreements over abortion were one of the main sticking points in earlier talks that derailed a compromise.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., speaks to reporters following the weekly policy luncheons at the Capitol, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there’s a “potential pathway” to an agreement in January, but acknowledged, “we’re not going to pass anything by the end of this week.”

Staff writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Ali Swenson contributed to this report.

ChatGPT and its peers have become the bane of teachers. Students churn out homework assignments with it and, according to one exasperated professor, secretly feed themselves smart comments for class discussions.

Far from helping kids think for themselves, today’s artificial intelligence tools offer an irresistible cognitive shortcut they’ll likely depend on through their adult lives and careers. RIP critical thinking.

So Estonia is pioneering a better way of using ChatGPT to learn — by making it harder and retraining the model to pose more questions than answers. The effort challenges ChatGPT’s core appeal and could get the cold shoulder from OpenAI, but it could also unlock AI’s true potential in education in a way no one else has managed.

Estonia, which has a population of 1.4 million, has long been a technology pioneer. A 1990s effort to digitize all government services turned it into one the most digitally sophisticated countries. This January, it’ll also become the first to give all schools access to ChatGPT Edu, a version of the popular chatbot developed for universities. OpenAI has mostly given it stronger privacy protections, but Estonian scientists also want to modify the model in the coming months to make it a better teacher.

Fine tuning changes an AI model’s behavior. Engineers retrain an existing model on new data — in this case, conversations with students — and give it new instructions to alter how it responds, so it prompts the user to think instead of giving a polished answer. That, however, can make it feel less helpful by ChatGPT’s usual standards.

Generative AI’s value to both businesses and consumers is its output. It’s why Estonia’s high school students got instantly hooked on ChatGPT a couple of years ago. The country’s students bring in Europe’s highest PISA scores (PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment and the scores are collated by the OECD), which rank the scholastic performance of 15-year-old students in reading, math and science, and with pressure high to maintain those grades, many turned to AI. “We started noticing with my fellow teachers that the text quality changed,” says Ivo Visak, a former high school principal who is now heading Estonia’s AI-in-schools effort. “Sometimes it turned better but sometimes it turned weird.”

Visak foresaw a rise in academic fraud and decline in critical thinking; Estonia could either race to catch up with the future or try to steer it, he says. Fortunately, the country is used to being an early adopter: As part of its digital leap forward in the 1990s, it gave every school computers with fast internet access and trained teachers to use them.

Now, with its next leap into AI, older teachers are the most enthusiastic users because they lived through that earlier tech transition and know the drill.

Katriin Henrietta Kriisa, a 16-year-old high school student in the city of Tartu, says her biology teacher regularly asks the class to use AI. One recent assignment was to ask ChatGPT to play the role of the 19th century eugenicist Francis Galton, interview the bot and then write an article — “NOT with AI assistance!” the brief emphasized — about the ethics of eugenics. Her school is one of nine in a pilot program using ChatGPT Edu.

Another English teacher told the class to type the prompt “Ask me deeper and deeper questions about the novel. Don’t give me answers — only questions that help me think” into ChatGPT on their laptops. “The whole point was to make us trust using it but to still be as critical as when you search something on the internet,” Kriisa says.

Her principal, Mari Roostik, is trying to steer students away from using ChatGPT for answers only, which is about as easy as telling a kid who’s been eating McDonalds every day for lunch that they should now switch to vegetables. “The fact that it is so helpful and pleasant goes against learning,” says Jaan Aru, a computer science professor at the University of Tartu, who’s leading the research team studying how Estonian schools use ChatGPT Edu and recommending changes to OpenAI. “Learning always requires some friction. You learn only when it’s a bit hard.”

Aru and his colleagues are analyzing anonymized transcripts of how Estonian students are using the chatbot to see how often it gives them answers versus prodding them with questions like “What would be your first step in solving this problem?” Large language models are uncannily good at sympathizing, but Aru also wants to see the AI encourage students to keep going, especially when tasks become complex. Some of those changes are taking effect for the Estonian version of ChatGPT Edu, but slowly. Over the coming months, he hopes the transcripts show less instances of “I don’t know” and “just give me the answer” from the students and more evidence that they are thinking through a problem.

The biggest challenge is that OpenAI doesn’t have to apply any of Estonia’s feedback to the worldwide version of ChatGPT Edu, especially around adding friction to make it a better teacher. Make the AI too tough a taskmaster and students may switch to another AI model, even if the more challenging chatbot produces better learning outcomes. And retraining ChatGPT Edu would probably cost millions of dollars; OpenAI is already burning through cash.

If Aru and his team can push for necessary changes in ChatGPT, they could end up doing the rest of the world a favor. But changing habits won’t be easy, even at home. In a recent biology test, Kriisa says her classmates were complaining that the bot kept giving them questions.

“I somehow got lucky,” she says, laughing. “It just gave me answers.”

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

 

Over the past few months, a troubling pattern has emerged across America’s major cities. As President Donald Trump’s administration dispatches federal agents and National Guard troops to jurisdictions — often over the objections of local residents and leaders — police departments are being forced to navigate an increasingly precarious position. If they embrace federal intervention, they risk being seen as acting against the will of the communities they serve. If they fail to align with Washington’s agenda, they invite political backlash for not showing unquestioning loyalty to the “thin blue line” that unites law enforcement.

This no-win situation is yet another symptom of the growing politicization of law enforcement and public safety. And as a retired police lieutenant who spent more than two decades on the force, I see this trend as an existential threat to the legitimacy our profession relies on to be effective.

Anyone who has worked in this field knows that policing can only function through community trust and cooperation. Our ability to uphold safety depends on the public’s belief that police are there to protect them — not to serve as an occupying force or an arm of political power. Federal encroachment on local policing blurs that line, creating a tightrope act that’s proving difficult for departments to balance.

In the Chicago area, federal law enforcement’s heavy-handed tactics have put local police directly in the crossfire, both literally and figuratively. After federal agents repeatedly deployed tear gas in residential neighborhoods — exposing at least 40 Chicago police officers and countless bystanders — a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the use of certain types of force against protesters. In nearby Broadview, federal agents have also tear-gassed local police officers outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility that has drawn regular protests. The village’s police chief has accused ICE agents of making false police reports, and his department has opened at least three criminal investigations into incidents involving ICE agents.

In Washington, D.C., local police are facing sharp criticism after failing to document a shooting by a federal agent during an October traffic stop. While the Metropolitan Police Department was not responsible for the shooting, its decision not to include the gunfire in a subsequent incident report has raised serious questions about transparency and accountability. One officer even testified that a superior instructed him not to document the incident in court records. Whether that decision stemmed from confusion, pressure or fear of political repercussions, the result is the same: a loss of public trust that hinders the department’s ability to do the job effectively.

Similar problems have emerged in Portland, where police leaders have testified that federal intervention has made their jobs harder, not easier. During a recent federal trial over the legality of sending National Guard troops to the city, a local police commander told the court that protests swelled in size and intensity following Trump’s deployment order. He also documented “startling” incidents of excessive force by federal officers, including the use of tear gas and pepper balls affecting both protesters and local police. His testimony reinforced concerns among local officials who have warned that federal involvement is creating unnecessary danger for officers and the public alike.

These episodes point to rising tensions between local and federal law enforcement, which are only complicating the broader public safety landscape. Each new confrontation creates additional risks for the community and forces local police to divert attention from their core work of preventing and solving crime. That strain appeared to surface again in Chicago in October, when Border Patrol agents clashed with protesters and local police were accused of not providing adequate backup to secure the scene — a claim the city’s police superintendent has denied.

Some departments have also sought to carve out some much-needed middle ground in the face of this emerging conflict. After millions of Americans took to the streets for October’s “No Kings” protests, several large agencies publicly thanked demonstrators for keeping the peace and reaffirmed their commitment to protecting First Amendment rights.

Rather than buy into an “us versus them” framing, police in cities such as Chicago, Seattle, San Diego and New York issued statements that remained community-focused and free of partisan posturing. These departments seemed to recognize that the protesters were people whose trust and support they need to be effective and whose freedoms they are sworn to uphold. At a time of rising polarization, this sort of engagement reminds the public that police ultimately serve the community, not any political entity. But the politicized nature of federal interference only makes that message harder to maintain.

At its core, policing depends on legitimacy — the belief that officers act fairly, lawfully and in service of the people. Once that belief falters, public trust falters with it. The more law enforcement is pulled into partisan battles, the harder it becomes for officers to foster cooperation. Instead of building partnerships, they’re left trying to police through division.

If leaders truly want to act in the interest of public safety, they should start by ensuring that police remain insulated from politics. That means respecting the boundaries between federal and local authority, holding law enforcement to high standards of transparency and accountability, and trusting communities to shape their own safety priorities. At the end of the day, policing works best when departments can focus on their core mission — keeping communities safe —without the added distraction of politics.

Retired Lt. Diane Goldstein is a 21-year police veteran and executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, known as LEAP, a nonprofit group of police, judges and other law enforcement professionals who support policies that improve public safety and police-community relations. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

BOSTON — ICE isn’t doing itself any favors.

Videos shared via social media in recent months showing ICE agents dragging people from cars, smashing car windows, and deploying tear gas in residential neighborhoods only serve to bolster the progressive narrative that immigration law is superfluous and upholding it an act of tyranny.

Lost in the mix are the arrests and deportations of criminals, such as Abdulkadir Sharif Abdi, a criminal illegal immigrant from Somalia, known current member of Vice Lord Nation. He has been convicted of fraud, receiving stolen property, receiving a stolen vehicle, vehicle theft, and multiple probation violations, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Then there’s Sahal Osman Shidane, a criminal illegal immigrant from Somalia, convicted of criminal sexual conduct with a minor aged 13-15. And Rudy Arendondo Jarillo, a criminal illegal immigrant from Mexico, convicted of felony smuggling aliens. There were more caught in a recent sweep of Minneapolis, and others charged with similar crimes nabbed around the country, including Massachusetts.

It’s crucial to get pedophiles, gang members, human traffickers and other criminals off the street, and that part of the ICE equation benefits our communities. But the strong-arm scenarios played out in dozens of phone videos gone viral overshadow these laudable efforts.

People remember the woman dragged from her car by masked federal agents earlier this fall and detained after a traffic accident. The woman, Dayanne Figueroa, is a U.S. citizen.

U.S. Immigration has deported people in the country illegally for decades, but it never looked like this. Under Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama, immigration officials targeted worksites, whether in raids or auditing companies’ records for illegal workers.

President Joe Biden upended efforts to keep the border secure by rolling out the welcome mat, and we are paying the price today. But the guns-drawn, tear-gas-throwing, aggressive arrests are a shock to the system, no matter who you voted for.

Earlier this year, Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-IL, wrote to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on recent changes to ICE’s hiring practices: “… Scores of masked and unidentified federal agents have already conducted unlawful arrests — including of U.S. citizens — and engaged in excessive force without clear cause.

Whether it is an officer mishandling a gun and pointing it at bystanders or federal agents arresting U.S. citizen children in the dead of night, these mishaps have terrible consequences on immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.”

Durbin added that ICE has made changes in age requirements for new recruits. Previously, one had to be at least 21 years old and no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position. DHS announced that applicants can now apply at the age of 18 and there is no age cap.

“ICE also removed its Spanish-language requirement — shortening the training program by five weeks — and is pursuing additional ways to expedite training.”

The agency is setting itself up to fail, each video fueling the “ICE is bad” mantra and ultimately making our streets less safe.

ICE needs to cool down the incendiary players and return to its law enforcement message.

— The Boston Herald