Sen. Ted Cruz said a roundly criticized House Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare can be salvaged and that the White House is playing an active part in negotiations.
The Texas Republican told reporters Wednesday that the American Health Care Act, a bill that would gut and partially replace Obamacare, couldn’t pass the Senate as written.
“I don’t think the House bill as currently drafted gets the job done,” Cruz said. But he said the bill can be fixed and that the White House is “playing an active part in negotiating improvements.”
Cruz’s comments come two days after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would result in an additional 24 million uninsured people over the next decade.
He was among nine conservative senators who met at the White House Tuesday about the bill.
Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, who also attended the meeting, said that now the “beginning of negotiations. I would think pre-negotiations.”
President Trump has reached out and met with conservative House members who have been opposed to the bill. The House Freedom Caucus opposes the bill because they believe it isn’t conservative enough.
However, more moderate Republican House members are pulling support after the CBO estimate.
Cruz played down questions on whether the White House thinks the bill could survive as is, saying only that lawmakers are striving to get “legislative consensus.”
He outlined what changes he wants to see, but those moves could cost support from GOP moderate senators.
Among the changes are freezing the Medicaid expansion immediately, not in 2020.
“At the minimum we should freeze new enrollees. That means current enrollees would remain covered,” he said.
Cruz noted that extending the expansion would prompt states to add more people to their Medicaid rolls.
GOP moderates from expansion states have been worried about the fate of the expansion and called the longer transition a step in the right direction.
