President Obama offered a vigorous defense of Obamacare on Wednesday and promised to veto a bill repealing major components of the law, which Republicans hope to put on his desk before Christmas.
“The Affordable Care Act is working and is fully integrated into an improved American health-care system,” according to a White House statement of administrative policy released Wednesday. “Discrimination based on pre-existing conditions is a thing of the past. And under the law, health-care prices have grown at the slowest rate in 50 years, benefiting all Americans.”
The president’s central defense of Obamacare was undermined by a Department of Health and Human Services report that health-care spending grew at a faster pace in 2014 than during any other year of Obama’s presidency. “The return to faster growth and an increased share of GDP in 2014 was largely influenced by the coverage expansions of the Affordable Care Act,” the report says.
Obama’s veto threat comes as no surprise, but it remains a political eventuality that Senate Democrats have avoided by blocking all previous House-passed legislation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) is attempting to use a budgetary process called reconciliation to circumvent the filibuster, but the process can only be used to repeal those aspects of Obamacare that have a budgetary effect. With that in mind, House Republicans passed a partial-repeal bill targeting the individual and employer mandates, along with prominent taxes levied by the law. The bill also defunds Planned Parenthood.
#share#Senate Republicans had some difficulty mustering 51 votes for the House-passed bill, as moderate Republicans opposed the defunding of Planned Parenthood and a trio of conservatives senators suggested they would not vote for a partial Obamacare repeal.
Senate leaders responded by adding provisions that would wind down Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and the subsidies it provides for purchasing insurance. “By building upon the House’s good work, this bill could also save billions in spending and eliminate more than a trillion-dollar tax burden on the American people,” McConnell said Tuesday.
The proposal won praise from conservative Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah). “I like where it’s heading. It looks good,” he said. “I’m very encouraged.”
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.