Even though she was a private citizen eight years ago, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is helping revive an old joke told by conservatives that Republican leaders were keeping their “secret” health care plan in the basement of the Capitol. Ms. Greene on Tuesday laid into GOP colleagues for not having a viable plan to keep insurance costs down. 

In 2017, as President Trump was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, conservative lawmakers like Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, as well as members of the House Freedom Caucus, helped sink efforts at a partial repeal of the landmark 2010 law. Mr. Paul went so far as to walk around the Capitol with a portable photocopier so he could make a copy of the repeal bill being written by Republicans behind closed doors. 

After Ms. Greene went after her colleagues for not having a real plan to address current health care costs, a reporter reminded others of the photocopier stunt. “We never did find it,” Mr. Paul joked about the ‘secret’ GOP plan in response on Tuesday. 

Ms. Greene’s current broadsides against Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican leaders comes as she is breaking with President Trump on key issues like the cost of living, the weakness of the American job market, and intervention in conflicts abroad. 

On Tuesday, the Georgia congresswoman said she had asked Mr. Johnson directly during a Republican-only conference call about his plan to address the cost of insurance, which is expected to rise significantly next year. 

“I said I have no respect for the House not being in session passing our bills and the President’s executive orders,” Ms. Greene wrote on X in response to a journalist who reported she had told Mr. Johnson that she was frustrated with how the shutdown is playing out. 

“And I demanded to know from Speaker Johnson what the Republican plan for healthcare is to build the off-ramp off Obamacare and the ACA tax credits to make health insurance affordable for Americans,” she added. “Johnson said he’s got ideas and pages of policy ideas and committees of jurisdiction are working on it, but he refused to give one policy proposal to our GOP conference on our own conference call.”

“Apparently I have to go into a SCIF to find out the Republican healthcare plan!!!” Ms. Greene continued, referring to a sensitive compartmented information facility, which are rooms where lawmakers and officials receive classified information. 

Beyond Republican leaders in the House and Senate, which have been arguing for a simple government funding extension with no health care reforms attached, there are other lawmakers — both in the middle and on the more populist fringes — who are embracing Ms. Greene’s position. 

“I think the problem is that if it’s just a straight-up extension for a year, it just sets us up for the same drama next year,” Senator Thom Tillis, who is retiring, told the New York Sun of a simple extension of Obamacare premium subsidies. He says the Republicans’ goal — as Ms. Greene has articulated — should be to create a way to “ramp them down” over the course of two years. 

“Certainly we think income cap[s]” on subsidies “have to happen,” Mr. Tillis told the Sun. 

A more populist conservative type in the party, Senator Josh Hawley, agreed with both Mr. Tillis and Ms. Greene that the total lack of a solution is unacceptable. He tells the Sun that the average person in his home state of Missouri is going to see a significant increase in costs next year. 

“I think it’s good somebody’s thinking about what we’re gonna do here,” Mr. Hawley said when asked about Mr. Tillis’s proposal for at least some kind of extension and off ramp. “Premiums are going to double in my state for almost half-a-million people. I mean, that’s just not feasible.”

“I think there are some very common sense measures that we could take that would appropriately reform it. I mean, for one thing, an income cap I think is totally reasonable and probably necessary,” Mr. Hawley told the Sun on Tuesday. 

“Other colleagues maybe have other ideas, but we need to do something,” he added.