When a few Senate Democrats voted to end the longest government shutdown in history last month, the one concession they secured from Republican leader John Thune was a mid-December vote on a measure to extend expiring Obamacare premium subsidies . The vote is now supposed to happen later this week amid general acknowledgment that without action on the subsidies, both premiums and out-of-pocket costs for over 20 million Americans are going to skyrocket in January.

This will be a much bigger problem for Republicans than for Democrats, for three reasons: (1) Democrats have been hyperventilating over this “subsidy cliff” for months, placing it at the very center of their shutdown strategy ; (2) it’s part of a more general health-care policy landscape in which the GOP is widely perceiv

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