GOP Sen Lee: Repeal Obamacare, Then Replace — Current Bill Does ‘A Whole Lot for the Insurance Industry’

Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) explained why he remains a no-vote on the current health care proposal before the Senate proposed by the Republican leadership.

One of the concerns raised by Lee’s colleagues in the Senate according to show co-host Clayton Morris is that some of the details fine print remain unclear. Lee argued that was reason for the Senate to proceed with a repeal vote now and work on the replacement in the future.

“That’s always a concern,” Lee replied. “It’s one of the reasons why I’ve advocated for the last six months pushing a simple repeal bill — something patterned perhaps, or built upon the foundation of the 2015 repeal bill, you know, the one we passed in December of 2015. If people knew what was in there, they could vote on that. We could pass that with a delayed implementation provision, and then we could figure out what comes next later in an iterative, step by step process — one that could potentially involve Democrats once Obamacare has been repealed.”

Morris then asked if repeal were to be passed by the Senate, why should people have confidence that Congress would pass a replacement, to which Lee argued that despite that uncertainty, the current bill was not working.

“In the sense that people have said we don’t know whether it could pass. But, you know, the current bill that we’ve been working with hasn’t fared so well either. Look, I’m willing to try to make that one work. As it’s written now, I’m a no. I’m a no because that bill does a whole lot for the insurance industry. That bill does a whole lot for the affluent. It brings about hundreds of billions of dollars of tax reductions for the affluent. That bill has some provisions for the poor, but it leaves out the forgotten man and the forgotten woman. It needs to do more to help America’s middle class, those who elected Donald Trump president. I think we could get there. But so far it has been stalled out. And I think it’d be much quicker, a much more direct process to go back to doing that which every Republican who’s campaigning for federal office in the last seven years has promised to do, which is to repeal Obamacare.”

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