Portman leery of Democratic offer to help fi x Obamacare
WASHINGTON — In a letter signed by Ohio's Sherrod Brown, every Senate Democrat said Tuesday they would be willing to work with Senate Republicans to revise part of the 2010 health-care law known as Obamacare.
Although Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said he has not seen interest among Democrats in trying to forge a bipartisan compromise, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said “we’re ready to work in a bipartisan, open, transparent way to improve and reform our healthcare system.”
The Democratic offer, however, included two key conditions. It insists on Republicans dropping their plans to completely scrap Obamacare. And it urges the GOP to “drop the current partisan effort” to revise Obamacare through a budget maneuver known as reconciliation, which would allow a Republican bill to pass the Senate with just 51 votes, avoiding a Democratic filibuster.
House Republicans approved a bill last week that would dramatically revise Obamacare, making it more difficult for states such as Ohio to continue expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income people and giving states the opportunity to permit private plans with less coverage than current law.
In a conference call Tuesday with Ohio reporters, Portman, who is a one of 13 members of a Senate working group on the legislation, questioned the sincerity of the Democrats' offer.
“We ought to test that proposition," he said. "That’s not what I’m hearing from my colleagues."
Portman said he would “love to see this be a bipartisan effort," but that he has not seen "interest in doing that up to now ... among a lot of my colleagues because there is this sense that touching (Obamacare) is somehow going to dismantle health care in this country.” He insisted the 2010 law “hasn’t worked.”
Democrats have refrained from introducing their own bills to dramatically revise Obamacare, in large part because the law has extended health coverage to more than 20 million Americans who were without insurance before President Barack Obama signed the law.
In 2015, Brown introduced a bill that would have repealed what is known as the “Cadillac tax,” which would eventually levy an excise tax on expensive health plans. Although the law does not call on the tax to be imposed on the consumer, there are fears health insurers would pass the costs on to consumers.
The House voted to abolish the Cadillac tax along with nearly $800 billion worth of taxes during the next decade, most of which are to be paid by the wealthy and pharmaceuticals.