Cross-partisan "bridgers" on Capitol Hill are collaborating on Health Care Affordability -- even if it's not in the news

Did your algorithm feed you this?

In case you missed it, just two weeks before Christmas, with little fanfare, Rep. Jen Kiggans (VA-02, R, A, 99.01) introduced H.R.6575 - CommonGround for Affordable Health Care Act with sponsorship from 38 colleagues in the House across both parties.

Her house resolution would temporarily extend ACA subsidies while providing a framework for a bipartisan collaboration on more structural reforms in time for a vote targeted in mid-summer 2026.

Here you have a Republican representative authoring a resolution that earned co-sponsorships from a coalition of 15 other Republicans and 23 Democrats who are united in their interest in advancing the messy work of hashing out solutions for our common good.

In doing so, these 39 members of Congress are eschewing performative politics and instead are rolling up their sleeves and do the work we as citizens hired them to do.

Realistically, you probably didn’t hear about this bipartisan initiative, because your algorithm optimized to profit from our outrage economy is not calibrated to distribute to you such dopamine-light, boring, and unprofitable news.

Even more troubling, I’d posit that most citizens wouldn’t recognize any of the names of the Representatives who have spent time, effort, and political capital to put their name behind this bill.

Naturally, I was curious what the Bridge Grades were of the 39 collaborators:

After a quick analysis, I was completely unsurprised to discover that 33 of the 39 participants are bridgers who earn As and Bs, while a random sample of House reps would yield just 19 or 20.

1. Congressional leaders with high Bridge Grades (and generally low recognition rates) are consistently the ones pushing cross-partisan solutions forward, as corroborated once again by Rep. Kiggans’ legislation.

2. Your algorithm is tricking you that bipartisan efforts don’t exist.

3. There are bridgers in both parties who make efforts to collaborate on important topics, even if their party leaders don’t support their initiatives to go forward.

4. Bridge Grades keep sharpening over time, and can reliably sort the bridgers from the dividers in the House and the Senate within both parties.

We’ve got a couple of things cooking including an improvement to our grading methods (Q1 release) and some new and fun ways to let you dig deeper into each legislator’s Bridge Grades. Please subscribe to stay up to date and be the first to know whenever we release updated Bridge Grades.