Senate Republicans are reversing course and now taking a hard look at health care legislation to replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act in case the courts strike down former President Obama’s signature achievement.
There’s a sense of urgency among GOP lawmakers to come up with a plan to replace the most popular components of ObamaCare after a panel of appellate judges on Tuesday aggressively questioned whether the law passes legal muster following Congress’s repeal of the tax penalty for not having insurance.
A nullification in the courts could leave millions of people with pre-existing medical conditions without insurance and disrupt coverage for others.
Just the consideration of legislative action is an about-face from a few months ago when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Senate Republicans would not move legislation to replace ObamaCare before the 2020 election, arguing it would have no chance of passing Congress, particularly with a Democratic-controlled House.
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Texas) even laid aside the thorny debate over how to reform health insurance — a central component of ObamaCare — to focus instead on finding ways to reduce health costs.
But on Tuesday, McConnell pledged that the Senate would act swiftly to protect people with pre-existing medical conditions if a GOP-backed lawsuit is successful in overturning ObamaCare.
“I think the important thing for the public to know is there’s nobody in the Senate not in favor of covering pre-existing conditions,” McConnell said.
“We would act quickly on a bipartisan basis to restore” those protections if struck down by the courts, he added.
The lawsuit in question, backed by a group of Republican governors and attorneys general, asserts that the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandate is unconstitutional and therefore the entire law should be struck down.
McConnell told reporters a few months earlier that he had no plans to move major health care legislation before the election, pouring cold water on President Trump’s plan to rebrand the GOP as “the party of health care.”
Senate Republican leaders in March balked when Trump pressured them at a private meeting to advance legislation to replace ObamaCare. GOP leaders in the Senate were reluctant to stir up divisions within their conference over how to proceed on the divisive issue.
Republicans familiar with this week’s negotiations say any ObamaCare replacement plan will be far more narrow than the Democratic legislation from a decade ago.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who as governor of Massachusetts in 2006 implemented a health insurance law that later served as a template for ObamaCare, is taking the lead in negotiations, according to Republican senators who have spoken to him.
Romney is working with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and consulting closely with Alexander and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
“I’ve talked to Romney about it,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). “I think it’s important that we have a plan and a reassertion that we believe that people with pre-existing conditions should be covered.”
Republican lawmakers say they need to be more prepared with ideas to replace ObamaCare than they were in 2017, when a seven-month effort to repeal and place the law failed on the Senate floor in spectacular fashion.
“If there’s one thing we learned from the ObamaCare fight two years ago: We better be prepared in advance with more specificity as to what our plans our,” Capito said, referring to the GOP’s unsuccessful attempt to repeal and replace ObamaCare in 2017.