A prominent House Republican acknowledged Friday that Obamacare is unlikely to be repealed.
“We need to look at reforming the exchanges,” Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State told the Spokane Spokesman-Review Thursday during a tour of eastern Washington.
McMorris Rodgers, a five-term congresswoman who delivered the GOP response to this year’s State of the Union Address, has been an important vote in previous attempts to repeal Obamacare. She is the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference and remains sharply critical of the unpopular health-care law, which next year will begin penalizing Americans who are unable or unwilling to purchase health insurance.
“It is a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to health care,” she told the paper, adding that it reduces consumer choice and that even the individual mandate requiring people to buy insurance will not get full enrollment. Obamacare was originally advertised as a means to get the 44 million Americans who lack health insurance into the system, but it has so far seen 8 million enrollments — many of those replacement plans for people whose own health plans had been canceled as a result of the law.
House Republicans have voted 54 times to repeal the law, which was unpopular with the public at the time it was enacted and became much more so once it began to be widely implemented last year. Republicans have been hoping to make public discontent with Obamacare a central issue in the upcoming midterm elections.