Rand: Senate Healthcare Bill ‘May Be Obamacare-Plus’ on Subsidies, ‘Subsidizes the Death Spiral’

On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) argued that the Senate’s healthcare bill may provide more subsidies than Obamacare does.

Rand said, “[W]hen we look at the bill, we actually find that with the Obamacare subsidies, not only are we keeping them, we may actually be providing more subsidies than Obamacare has. Our early estimates on the bill are that the bill may spend more in the next year or two than Obamacare does. And so, it’s hard for us to get our mind around that this is a repeal bill if we’re spending more, keeping all the subsidies, and then we’re going to start a brand new federal entitlement program where we give insurance companies money.”

He added, “I keep reading it and…it sounds like Obamacare to me. It doesn’t even sound like Obamacare-lite. In some areas, it may be Obamacare-plus, on the subsidy side.”

Rand later stated that the Republican bill “subsidizes the death spiral of Obamacare. It dumps a bunch of federal money, taxpayer money, or borrowed money into the insurance industry and says, ‘Hey, please lower the prices if we give you money.'”

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