Sen. Ted Cruz Is Working On A Bill That Would Repeal AND Replace Obamacare

The Senate is currently tackling America’s health care debacle. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put together a 13-member working group to draft a new health care proposal (they’re using the House version as more of a “guide”), and it already sounds 10 times better than the House GOP’s version.

Sen. Ted Cruz is one of the lawmakers involved with the working group, and he’s pushing a “one-and-done” bill that would repeal AND replace Obamacare in one fell swoop. It’d include the ability to purchase insurance across state lines and involve “medical malpractice reform, health savings accounts and the expansion of association health plans.”

His proposal would essentially eliminate the House GOP’s “phased” approach. (That’s one of the things that makes me really nervous about the House GOP’s plan. How do I KNOW they’ll go through with phase two and three?)

Cruz said he has been working for weeks with the now-thirteen member group of GOP senators on an Obamacare repeal and replacement plan that would eliminate the need for a second phase of legislation to replace failing healthcare law. Instead of a limited repeal and replace bill followed by another bill later, the GOP wish-list for replacing Obamacare would be packed into a single budget resolution to repeal Obamacare that could pass with only GOP support using a tool called reconciliation.

 

“I believe the only meaningful healthcare reform will be through reconciliation,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner in an interview.

“Senate Democrats are listening to their radical left wing base of their party and so no health care reform legislation will garner 60 votes because there are not eight senators who will vote for any of the legislation,” Cruz said, according to the Washington Examiner. “I think the answer, very simply, is to put it all in one bucket.”

Cruz believes the provisions can be included in the reconciliation measure without running afoul of the Senate rules.

 

“Every one of the reforms reduces premiums and has a significant budgetary impact and therefore, under the terms of the statue, those reforms are permissible under reconciliation,” Cruz said.

The big takeaway? The Senate is going in a completely different direction than the House.

“The objective here, the test for success should be, are we reducing the cost of premiums?” Cruz said, according to the Washington Examiner. “And if we have succeeded, consumers will have more choices, more options, lower premiums and more ability to get health insurance and healthcare for their families.”

That’s the objective. Can the Senate do it? Your guess is as good as mine.