The House approved a budget Friday providing for Congress to axe the revenue-related portions of Obamacare, teeing up a repeal procedure that congressional Democrats are powerless to stop.
The spending plan, cleared with few GOP defections and passed the day before by the Senate, instructs relevant committees to draw up legislation eliminating the law’s central provisions—including the individual mandate penalty—that can pass the upper chamber with a simple majority.
“The ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act will soon be history!” President-elect Donald Trump tweeted prior to the vote.
What the future has in store—a replacement—is uncertain. Republicans still have yet to agree on an Obamacare successor plan that would need to clear a 60-vote threshold in the Senate. The GOP holds only 52 seats.
Republicans have signaled in recent days that they want the two prongs of the “repeal and replace” sequence be in as close proximity as possible, with House speaker Paul Ryan saying the goal was to do them “concurrently.” His top deputy, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy, told radio host Hugh Hewitt this week that a bill repealing Obamacare’s budgetary items and including at least “some” replacement provisions would be on President-elect Donald Trump’s desk by the end of February.
There’s much wrangling to be done until then. Trump has indicated he is open to retaining some of the health care law’s popular and much-discussed ideas, specifically allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance until a certain age and restrictions on denying coverage to individuals with preexisting conditions. But it’s not simply a matter of carrying forward existing language; conservative health policy experts have their own take on how to address the preexisting conditions issue, for example, distinct from what exists in Obamacare.
Plans are aplenty on the GOP side, including from health and human services secretary nominee Tom Price (which mirrors a plan from Jeffrey H. Anderson), a trio of Republican senators (two of whom are still in office), and the House speaker himself.
“We have plenty of ideas to replace” the law, Ryan said during a recent press conference with Vice President-elect Mike Pence. “And you’ll see as the weeks and months unfold, what we’re talking about replacing it [with].”
