Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday called the bill a handful of Republicans are advancing to overhaul Obamacare an “intriguing idea,” and offered it as a foil to the socialized medicine approach recently endorsed by 16 Senate Democrats and independent Bernie Sanders.
The overhaul bill would transfer Obamacare’s revenue to states in the form of block grants so they could set up their own healthcare systems. It also would repeal the individual mandate and employer mandates.
“Governors and state legislators of both parties would have both the opportunity and the responsibility to help make quality and affordable healthcare available to their citizens in a way that works for their own particular states,” McConnell, R-Ky., said. “It’s an intriguing idea and one that has a great deal of support.”
Until these remarks, delivered on the Senate floor, McConnell had been largely silent about the legislation. He worked this summer to repeal and replace portions of Obamacare but a measure to narrowly repeal parts of Obamacare, called “skinny repeal,” ultimately failed in July after all Democrats and three Republicans voted against it.
The overhaul effort has been billed by its supporters as a move to reignite GOP efforts on healthcare. It was introduced by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Dean Heller of Nevada, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and faces a Sept. 30 deadline for passage to meet a recommendation from the Senate parliamentarian.
McConnell pointed to rising costs and insurer exits under Obamacare as reason to work on repeal and replacement efforts. He invoked the socialized medicine bill Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced last week as a warning for why Republicans needed to work to repeal portions of Obamacare.
“It envisions what is basically a fully government-run ‘single-payer’ system — the kind of system that would strip so many Americans of their health plans and take away so many decisions over their own health-care, that would require almost-unimaginably high tax increases, and that already collapsed in the Senator’s home state when Vermont tried to implement it,” McConnell said.
“This is a massive expansion of a failed idea, not a serious solution, but Democrats are coalescing around it anyway. They apparently think this massive expansion of a failed idea is what America’s healthcare future should look like. You can be sure they’ll do everything in their power to impose it on our country. But we don’t have to accept it as our future.”
During his remarks McConnell also thanked Graham and Cassidy for their work on the legislation.
The Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee are holding hearings on the overhaul bill next week. A detailed Congressional Budget Office score will not be available ahead of Sept. 30, but will publish preliminary findings.
