“The bill is fixable,” Sen. Tom Cotton told a quiet crowd of conservatives gathered for National Review Institute’s annual Ideas Summit in Washington, “but there’s a lot of fixes that it needs.”
Cotton, increasingly embroiled in a conflict with House Speaker Paul Ryan over his American Health Care Act, told Mona Charen that the AHCA “probably won’t come for a vote in the Senate” unless it is “substantially” changed.
Asked to rate the bill’s chances of becoming law on a scale of one to five, “as written,” Cotton said, it was “close to a one.” If changed, Cotton increased those odds to three and a half or four.
Cotton believes the most crucial problem for healthcare reform legislation to tackle is the “spiraling cost of healthcare.” The first term senator argued that the AHCA doesn’t “adequately address” the problem of increasing premiums.
Cotton downplayed the CBO’s prediction that premiums would decrease by 10 percent over time, noting the office’s prediction that premiums would rise in the short time. If that’s the case, Cotton said, “there won’t be a long run.”
The Arkansas Republican believes Obamacare’s central flaw was its strategy of tackling cost and access as “two different problems. If it “focused on cost and driven costs down,” Cotton said, “then, of course, access would have gone up.”
Regarding potential conflicts over the House bill’s defunding of Planned Parenthood with moderate Republican senators, Cotton told Charen that he has “not yet” heard from another senator that it would be a “dealbreaker” for them.
As speculation over Cotton’s relationship with the speaker of the house continues, Paul Ryan himself will take the stage at the summit Friday morning.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
