Health care bill push takes Pence on road
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Vice President Mike Pence appealed for total GOP congressional support for a White House-backed health overhaul during a brief visit Saturday to Kentucky, where the Republican governor and junior senator are among the plan’s skeptics.
“This is going to be a battle in Washington, D.C., and for us to seize this opportunity to repeal and replace ‘Obamacare’ once and for all, we need every Republican in Congress, and we’re counting on Kentucky,” Pence said at an energy company where business leaders had gathered.
He said President Donald Trump would lean on House Republicans — including two Kentucky lawmakers in the audience, Reps. Andy Barr and Brett Guthrie — to vote to replace former President Barack Obama’s law.
“Most importantly of all, the top priority the president gave us is to work with members of Congress to make sure the Obamacare nightmare is about to end,” Pence said.
The former Indiana governor has been the chief salesman for Trump’s push to jettison the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The House is expected to vote on the bill in less than two weeks, but
the bill faces resistance from critics within the GOP, including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who has called the initial draft “Obamacare Lite.”
In many ways, Kentucky represents the front line of the health care debate. The number of Kentuckians enrolled in Medicaid has doubled since the end of 2013, with nearly one-third of its residents now in the program. Pence’s motorcade passed a group of protesters chanting, “Save our care.”
Under Obama’s health plan, governors were given the option to expand Medicaid — which now covers roughly 10 million people in 31 states and the District of Columbia — in their home states.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s Democratic predecessor, Steve Beshear, expanded Medicaid during his tenure. Democrats praised Beshear’s use of the health care law to drive down the state’s uninsured rate and his smooth rollout of kynect, the staterun exchange, while Obama struggled with the national release of healthcare.gov.
But Bevin, a Republican, has said Medicaid will ultimately bankrupt the state, and he stopped new signups to Kentucky’s health exchange.
Bevin told reporters Friday that, like Paul, he was not impressed with the initial proposal in the House. But on Saturday, speaking before Pence, he said that while there were different views on how to change the law, “ultimately these differences of opinion will be rectified.” He said all could agree that “change has to come — the system is broken.”
He called Obama’s health plan a “catastrophe” and a “disaster” that needs to be repealed and replaced.
Pence, who was also recently sent to Ohio and Wisconsin to help push the Republican health plan, sought to cast health care as yet another bold action the administration has taken early in its term.
Trump, Pence said, “made a promise to you, the American people, and as I like to say, this White House is in the promise-keeping business.” He then listed several of the White House’s accomplishments so far, citing the process underway to stop illegal immigration, and to establish the Keystone XL and Dakota pipelines.
He also pointed to the recent upbeat jobs report.
“The truth is Kentucky is a textbook example of Obamacare’s failures,” Pence said, before reassuring “the people of Kentucky who might be looking on this morning” that his administration was racing to create a better replacement plan.
“We’re going to work with the Congress and work with our agency at Health and Human Services, and we’re going to have an orderly transition to a better health care system that makes affordable, high-quality health insurance available for every American,” he said.
About the same time Pence landed in Louisville, Trump tweeted, “We are making great progress with health care. ObamaCare is imploding and will only get worse. Republicans coming together to get job done!”
Pence’s event was at the Harshaw Trane facility in the hometown of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., whom Pence praised as “a true friend to me, to our president, and to the people of America.”
McConnell, however, did not attend because of a scheduling conflict.
In neighboring Tennessee, the Tennessee Hospital Association came out against the repeal-and-replace effort, saying the proposal poses “a dark forecast for the future of hospitals in Tennessee.”
The association, which represents 147 acute-care hospitals and health care facilities across the state, said in a statement Friday that the Affordable Care Act has been a challenge but that more people will lose coverage under the new House GOP bill because it reduces the amount of federal aid people would get to help them pay for their insurance.
“Primarily, we believe a significant number of the roughly 230,000 Tennesseans currently covered could lose their coverage because of an inability to pay for insurance due to significantly reduced
federal subsidies,” said Craig Becker, president and CEO of the association.
The Tennessee Hospital Association is affiliated with the American Hospital Association, which announced its opposition to the new proposal last week.
Despite the opposition from medical professionals and voters in conservative states who stand to lose care, Republicans who spent seven years promising to scrap the 2010 law say their strategy is worth the risk.
“If you ask someone to give up something, there will be resentment,” said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, and chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health. But, he added, “If that claims my congressional career, so be it. It will be worth it to me to have effected this change.”