With opposition building to a major GOP plan to repeal Obamacare, Vice President Mike Pence said that the plan would create an “orderly transition” from the controversial healthcare law.
Pence spoke Saturday in Louisville, Ky., and gave a full-throated endorsement of the American Health Care Act, which guts Obamacare and partially replaces it. Pence’s comments come after a week in which conservatives have opposed the bill as a new entitlement.
Pence also sought to downplay whether anyone would lose insurance coverage under the bill, which has yet to get a score from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on how it will affect coverage and federal spending.
“Despite some fear-mongering among those on the left, we are gonna work with Congress and work with Health and Human Services and we are gonna have an orderly transition to a better healthcare system,” Pence said. “We’re gonna make the best healthcare system in the world even better.”
Pence said that action is needed to end the “Obamacare nightmare.”
“Virtually every promise of Obamacare has been broken,” he said. “Medicaid here in Kentucky is threatening to bankrupt this state.”
Kentucky was one of the few red states to embrace Obamacare, creating its own state-run healthcare exchange and expanding Medicaid. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin ran to end the expansion, but has since left it intact after getting a waiver for changes from the federal government.
The Medicaid expansion is a major sticking point in the American Health Care Act. The bill keeps the expansion in place until 2020, at which time it replaces Medicaid with a per capita cap system that doles out federal spending based on the number of beneficiaries.
But conservatives in the House and Senate have opposed the long deadline and called for the expansion to end after this year. However, moderate GOP senators have clamored for a longer transition for the expansion, worried about coverage losses.
The Trump administration is open to amendments to the bill, but it remains unclear if a deal could be reached on Medicaid.
