SAN FRANCISCO – A top Obamacare architect wouldn’t disclose details of his recent meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, but said he stands ready, if asked, to help Republicans improve the healthcare law.
“I’m willing to work with anybody who wants to be constructive,” Zeke Emanuel told reporters at the Commonwealth Club, where he was scheduled to speak Wednesday night.
There’s little that Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist and brother to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, can do to prevent congressional Republicans from repealing big parts of the law he helped to write as an advisor to President Obama back in 2010.
But he’s been raising alarms for what could happen if Congress repeals the healthcare law without replacing it. Earlier this month he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that repealing the law would hurt not just the newly-insured but also businesses in general.
“What we need is not repeal, but repair,” Emanuel said Wednesday.
While it often seems there are miles of disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on health policy, Emanuel noted that there’s more overlap than politicians acknowledge. And that’s giving him hope for a bipartisan replacement plan, he said.
“If you talk to conservative and liberal health policy experts, there’s extensive overlap,” Emanuel said. “Once you put down a few of those things, you begin to constrain the universe of options. And I think within that universe, there’s pretty good agreement broadly on where to go.”
Once Trump takes office, it’s unlikely Emanuel will have a open line to the White House as he did during the Obama presidency. But he did meet last month with Trump in New York City, in a 45-minute meeting he declined to discuss in detail.
“[Trump] was fully attentive and fully engaged in the meeting, asked me a number of good questions and we had a frank, wide-ranging discussion,” Emanuel said. Asked for more details, he responded, “I don’t think I want to go into the ins and outs of that meeting.”
