Sen. Claire McCaskill is demanding that Senate leadership bring up a bill that aims to stabilize Obamacare’s insurance exchanges, legislation that stalled in March because of a major disagreement over abortion funding.
The Missouri Democrat, who is in a tough re-election race in the fall, said at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on drug prices Tuesday that there would be enough Democratic support to pass the bill that seeks to shore up the law’s insurance marketplaces.
“I can’t imagine there is any Democrat who would vote against that,” McCaskill said at the hearing.
The legislation would pay insurers cost-sharing payments that the Trump administration nixed last fall. It also would give money to states to set up a reinsurance program, which covers the biggest claims from Obamacare insurers that, in turn, lower premiums overall.
The goal of the bipartisan group of senators pursuing the legislation was to insert it in a March spending deal. But widespread disagreements between Republicans and Democrats caused the effort to collapse.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, tried to add the bill through unanimous consent to the March spending deal. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., quickly objected, saying that Republicans had reneged on an earlier arrangement for abortion coverage.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Democrats were the one to sink the effort.
“Democrats seem to have no interest in working with us on stabilizing the individual market,” he said.
The main disagreement was over whether the funding in the bill should abide by the Hyde amendment, a spending rider that prevents any federal funding from covering abortions. The rider has applied to appropriations bills for decades.
But Murray said in March that Republicans tried to add Hyde and other poison pills to the legislation.
She said that the bill would “make it so that women would not even be able to buy their own healthcare coverage that covers abortion.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who worked on the legislation, said spending bills have had to abide by Hyde since 1972 and this one should be no different.
Obamacare does not abide by the Hyde amendment and instead lets states opt out of forcing insurers to cover abortions. But under Hyde, a state would have to get federal permission to let insurers cover abortions.
The legislation has gone nowhere since March. Alexander has said that the March spending deal was likely the last, best chance to get a stabilization package through to affect 2019 insurance rates.
Insurers have been proposing rates for next year that range from huge spikes to drops, with some attributing their increases to the repeal of the individual mandate’s penalties in the Republican tax legislation.
