The latest version of the Senate GOP’s bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare died Tuesday night when GOP senators Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas announced their opposition to legislation. The bill could lose only two GOP votes and still pass, and Lee…
The latest version of the Senate GOP’s bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare died Tuesday night when GOP senators Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas announced their opposition to legislation. The bill could lose only two GOP votes and still pass, and Lee and Moran brought the grand total of GOP senators opposed to the bill to at least four. (Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine immediately opposed the bill after it was unveiled last week.)
Lee thought the bill was a “ caricature of a Republican health care bill, ” but he was willing to vote for it if it included Texas senator Ted Cruz’s » consumer freedom amendment, » which would allow insurers who sold at least one Obamacare-compliant plan to sell more affordable plans free of Obamacare’s regulations. The bill introduced last week included a modified version of the amendment that won Cruz’s support but that Lee found unacceptable.
“After conferring with trusted experts regarding the latest version of the Consumer Freedom Amendment, I have decided I cannot support the current version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act, ” Lee said in a statement. “In addition to not repealing all of the Obamacare taxes, it doesn’ t go far enough in lowering premiums for middle class families; nor does it create enough free space from the most costly Obamacare regulations.”
At the same time, Kansas senator Jerry Moran, who led the Senate GOP’s campaign committee in 2014, said in a statement:
There are serious problems with Obamacare, and my goal remains what it has been for a long time: to repeal and replace it. This closed-door process has yielded the BCRA, which fails to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address healthcare’s rising costs. For the same reasons I could not support the previous version of this bill, I cannot support this one.
We should not put our stamp of approval on bad policy. Furthermore, if we leave the federal government in control of everyday healthcare decisions, it is more likely that our healthcare system will devolve into a single-payer system, which would require a massive federal spending increase. We must now start fresh with an open legislative process to develop innovative solutions that provide greater personal choice, protections for pre-existing conditions, increased access and lower overall costs for Kansans.
The repeal-and-replace efforts faltered in the House of Representatives, with the bill being dramatically pulled from the floor March, before it barely passed in May. The Senate majority is much narrower, and it’s unclear if Republicans will find a way to write a bill that can win the support of 50 GOP senators.
