WHERE I STAND ON HEALTH CARE
CONGRESSMAN EXPLAINS WHY HE FINALLY OPPOSED GOP HEALTH PLAN
SPRINGFIELD >> The divide within the Republican Party has never been greater, said U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan, R-7 of Chadds Ford, in a interview with the Delaware County Daily Times Monday morning.
This comes just days after the congressman called the proposed bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act not “satisfactory ... nor an adequate replacement” after President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan pulled it prior to a vote.
On Monday Meehan said he was a firm “no” vote on the American Health Care Act, though he earlier voted for it as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. “I thought it was a responsibility to continue to move the discussion along,” Meehan said. The committee OK’d the AHCA on March 9. “It has fundamental problems and it was important to begin to look at ways in which it can be fixed.”
He said the bill didn’t do enough and left too many health care recipients in the lurch — namely the elderly and those recovering from opioid abuse.
“It was clear that there wasn’t going to be the kind of coverage that people would have wanted,” Meehan said.
Meehan and others on the committee were put in the dubious position to accept the bill before the Congressional Budget Office reviewed the implications of the law. After the bill had already passed through the committee, the CBO concluded that 24 million fewer people would be covered under the new health care law than the ACA.
“We discussed internally (within the Ways and Means Committee) the hope and expectation that we’d be able to get CBO numbers, but there was a process that was chosen largely because of the mechanics of the institution. Reconciliation has a window that’s driven by the time you have to do budgets, so you are working on a bit of clock,” Meehan said. “Once the CBO numbers came it had an impact, a very real impact on the willingness of a lot of others to get behind the continued momentum of the bill.”
He maintained that the number of people impacted would have been far fewer than the CBO had suggested.
“In the end, it’s not a large segment of the health care pie who are affected by this directly,” Meehan said. “It’s probably about 8 percent, and you don’t see quite as many people who are fundamentally affected directly.”
Not knowing Meehan’s official stance on the bill led hundreds of constituents to gather outside Meehan’s district office in Springfield to protest his perceived support of the AHCA.
When asked if Meehan should have been more transparent in his plans to vote “no” on the bill, he said kept mum in order to remain in the discussion with party leadership.
“I don’t deny that we worked to move the bill along,” Meehan said. “We were working right up until the end. I was negotiating, trying to see if we could make the bill better.”
He said that to take an official stance would have made him “irrelevant in the communications.”
Trump was applying ongoing pressure on House Republicans to vote after it was first postponed late Thursday night. Meehan said he did not directly communicate with the president.
“I did not personally hear from the president. I did not engage with the president. I chose not to. I could have, but I chose not to,” Meehan said.
After Thursday’s vote delay, Trump gave an ultimatum to House Republicans — to vote or be “stuck with Obamacare.”
Meehan said he continued to fight up until the final moments to move the bill to appeal to moderate Republicans, while it was the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus in the House that wanted to move it farther to the right. They often referred to the AHCA as “Obamacare Lite.”
“We moved in a certain direction in which there were a series of things which brought it further along towards what moderates were looking for to position it to go into the Senate,” Meehan said. “And then it was in the closing hours that it started to move in an opposite direction.”
Somewhere in that rift the AHCA was lost, a failure to gain enough support from the party, and none at all from Democrats.
“I thought the approach of utilizing that bill as a way to shift the responsibility away from the current structure in which the responsibility, the support, was moving away from taxes that are paid by the rich to a situation in which many people would feel the brunt of it — I was troubled by that,” Meehan said.
And now that the American people are “stuck with Obamacare,” which Trump said rests on the shoulders of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Shumer, DN.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., members of the GOP maintain that the law as written needs reform.
“It’s not currently sustainable,” Meehan said. “it’s expected that the premiums are going to rise double digits again, the markets do not have insurers in it, some states are reeling with the implications of this.”
Yet, with the failure of Republicans to find middle ground, Meehan said the divide within the GOP has never been greater in the six years he’s been in Congress.
“There’s divisions, and party itself is a tougher thing to define with the growth of outside interest groups that are proliferating on both ends, the ability for resources to be generated, you have a lot of free agents on both sides and it’s becoming harder and harder to work towards the middle,” Meehan said.
For now, Meehan foresees a pivot by the White House to focus on the budget and infrastructure, but he remains confident that the discussion on health care is not finished.
“The wound’s still a little raw right now, I think everybody is going to step back, and I believe there will be a pivot by the leadership, principally tax reform, probably infrastructure,” Meehan said. “I think (Obamacare) is going to have trouble, it’s going to have real trouble, there’s no doubt about it.”