Former House speaker John Boehner, who oversaw multiple attempts to undo Obamacare during his tenure, predicted Thursday that most of President Obama’s health care law “is going to stay there,” and that previous talk of repealing and replacing the law amounted to “happy talk.”
Boehner told a health care conference in Orlando he was unsure if the GOP’s legislating on the issue would resemble the Democrats’ strong-arm approach several years prior. But he was more certain of how the substance will look.
“Most of the Affordable Care Act, in the framework, is going to stay there: coverage for kids up to age 26, covering those with preexisting conditions. All of that’s going to be there. Subsidies for those who can’t afford it, who aren’t on Medicaid, who I call the working poor, subsidies for them will be there,” Boehner said. “What will be different is that [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] will not dictate to every single state how the plan’s going to run. And if the state wants to run an exchange, the state can run an exchange. The states will control the policies that are offered like they control every other insurance product offered in their states.”
He concluded that such an outcome was “not all that hard” to game out. What does add some unpredictability is that Republicans have failed to rally around a single health care reform proposal, for which the former speaker ripped his party.
“In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once. And all this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about repeal, repeal, repeal—yeah, we’ll do replace, replace—I started laughing, because if you pass repeal without replace, first, anything that happens is your fault. You broke it,” Boehner said to applause. “And secondly, as I told some of the Republican leaders when they asked, I said, if you pass repeal without replace you’ll never pass replace, because they will never ever agree on what the bill should be. Perfect always becomes the enemy of the good. And so we’ve got to marry them together.”
