We said Republicans would pay dearly for failing to replace ObamaCare, and the bill is already coming due this week in a political extortion fight with health insurers. The GOP may pad the omnibus spending bill with enough cash to preserve the law through the 2020 election.

Congress is debating how to handle cost-sharing reductions, which are payments to insurers for defraying out-of-pocket costs or deductibles for low-income individuals. The Trump Administration stopped these payments last year. Congress had declined to appropriate the money, and a federal judge said the Obama Administration wrote the checks illegally.

Moderate Republicans demanded a “stability” deal for ObamaCare as the price of repealing the law’s penalty for declining to purchase health insurance in the tax bill. That included billions in cost-sharing payments as well as reinsurance, which subsidizes high-cost patients to lower premiums for everyone else.

But the latest proposal is $30 billion of reinsurance over three years. This is a blowout compared with the roughly $5 billion over two years in reinsurance proposed last year by Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins.

Many groups on the right oppose the package as a bailout for insurers, and they’re right that the Affordable Care Act is a wealth transfer to third-party payers. The problem is that Democrats wrote the law to make sure insurers get paid one way or another, and the lobby has only become more demanding.