Jordan plans floor fight over health care bill
WASHINGTON — Republican Rep. Jim Jordan vowed Tuesday to join other conservatives in launching a floor fight to dramatically revise the House GOP leadership’s health care bill that he insists does not fully scrap the 2010 healthcare law known as Obamacare.
In an interview Tuesday on Fox and Friends, Jordan said he and other conservative allies will offer a series of amendments in an attempt to nudge the House leadership in a more market-oriented direction. But if the Republican and his allies succeed in shifting the bill to a more conservative route, it could cripple efforts to win the backing of Senate moderates.
Although Jordan never flatly said that he would vote against the GOP leadership bill without his amendments, he made it clear “that a bunch of us conservatives in the House don’t like this legislation. It’s got problems.”
The bill has the backing of House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and President Donald Trump. But if Jordan and roughly 40 other House GOP conservatives refuse to support the Ryan measure, they can kill the bill on the House floor, which would be a stunning defeat for Ryan.
Because all 193 House Democrats are expected to vote against the bill, Ryan can only lose a handful of the 237 Republicans in the House.
“It will come to the floor for a vote up or down for the full House next week,” Jordan said. “That’s the plan. That’s where we would like to offer the amendments that we’re working on that we think will make this bill consistent with what we told the voters we were going to accomplish.
“Remember this bill doesn’t repeal Obamacare,” Jordan said of the Ryan measure. “This bill doesn’t unite Republicans. This bill doesn’t bring down the cost of premiums.
“So that’s what we’re focused on bringing back — affordable insurance for working-class and middleclass families. This bill doesn’t accomplish that. We want to work to make sure it does.”
Although Jordan said the Ryan bill would not “bring down” the cost of premiums for individual policies, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported Monday that premiums in the individual marketplace would decline by as much as 10 percent between 2020 and 2026 for some, although older Americans would face higher premiums.
The CBO also projects that under the Ryan bill, as many as 24 million more Americans will lack health insurance by 2026. A more-conservative measure backed by Jordan could likely lead to even more people without coverage.
“I don’t put a whole lot of weight in the CBO,” Jordan said of its Monday report.
The Affordable Care Act, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama, expanded health insurance through federally subsidized individual insurance policies sold to middle-income people through federal and state marketplaces, and by expanding Medicaid eligibility to allow families of four earning as much as $34,000 a year to qualify.
Gov. John Kasich relied on the additional Medicaid dollars to extend coverage to 700,000 low-income people in Ohio. Established in 1965, Medicaid is a joint federal and state program which provides health coverage to lowincome people. Kasich and others are fighting to save the expansion of Medicaid.
But Jordan and other conservatives object to Ryan’s plan to replace the federal subsidies in the individual marketplace with refundable tax credits of as much as $4,000 a year. They also oppose Ryan’s plan to continue the Medicaid expansion until 2020. While Jordan is “open” to using tax credits to help people buy insurance, he opposes offering refundable tax credits in excess of their tax liabilities.
“There is a reason every major conservative organization in the country is opposed to this legislation,” Jordan said. “Every conservative health care policy expert I have talked to has concerns with this legislation. Five conservative senators have problems with this legislation.”
Jordan had been scheduled to meet with Trump on Tuesday at the White House, but the meeting was canceled because of a snowstorm which hit the nation’s capital.