House Speaker Paul Ryan on Friday defended the Republican healthcare bill as something that would lock in the biggest entitlement reform seen in decades.
While conservatives have complained that the bill would keep in place elements of Obamacare for years, Ryan said the GOP has to pursue this path because of the limitations of the reconciliation process.
But he also said it includes a massive reform of Medicaid that would dwarf the welfare reform bill of the 1990s.
“This is so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than welfare reform,” Ryan said on the Hugh Hewitt show Friday.
“We are de-federalizing an entitlement, block granting it back to the states, and capping its growth rate,” he said of Medicaid. “That’s never been done before.”
“Correct,” Hewitt said.
“And then, we’re taking another entitlement, an open-ended subsidy with the health insurance that the government makes you buy, and repealing it, and replacing it with Republican tax policy that we’ve been talking about for 20 years.”
While the GOP bill would kill the individual insurance mandate under Obamacare, it would also keep some subsidies for people who want to buy insurance, and would keep in place Medicaid expansion, something conservatives oppose.
