Vice President Mike Pence said Monday that Republicans should move forward with a bill that only repeals Obamacare if they can’t generate consensus around a plan that repeals and replaces the healthcare law.
“If they can’t pass this carefully crafted repeal-and-replace bill, we ought to repeal only,” Pence said in an interview on Rush Limbaugh’s show.
Senate Republicans are struggling to coalesce around a plan to repeal and replace the 2010 law.
The GOP revealed their healthcare proposal last month, but the bill was rebuked by conservative and moderate Republicans. Faced with growing opposition, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., delayed a vote on the bill repealing and replacing parts of Obamacare until after the weeklong Fourth of July recess, which ended Friday.
Though Republicans said they were willing to negotiate over the healthcare bill, McConnell has struggled to find changes to the current legislation that would earn support from the conservative and moderate factions of the GOP.
Instead, the majority leader and other Republicans are now floating the possibility of working with Democrats to stabilize the health insurance markets.
Conservatives, though, would like to see McConnell separate Obamacare’s repeal from a replacement and are calling for a plan to dismantle the healthcare law first with a replacement coming later.
Late last month, President Trump urged GOP lawmakers to separate repeal and replace if they can’t pass a bill doing both.
“If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!” Trump said on his Twitter account.
The strategy immediately gained traction with conservative lawmakers and outside groups, who said the current bill doesn’t repeal enough of Obamacare.
