Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in new remarks Thursday that he backs the Trump administration’s decision to join a lawsuit that would undo Obamacare’s protections for the sick.
“It’s no secret that we preferred to start over,” the Kentucky Republican said about Obamacare, which included new protections for people with pre-existing health conditions. “So no, I don’t fault the administration for trying to give us an opportunity to do this differently and to go in a different direction.”
McConnell made his remarks in an interview with Bloomberg Tuesday that was published Thursday.
The suit could result in all of Obamacare being thrown out, or just its protections banning health insurers from turning away sick people or charging them more. GOP efforts to overhaul Obamacare failed in 2017 after the party fell short by one vote in the Senate.
McConnell has said in recent days that the party would like to take another swing at repeal depending on the outcome of the election Nov. 6, but suggested to Bloomberg that the lawsuit would be another means to achieve a healthcare overhaul.
[Trump: Obamacare to be gone ‘pretty soon’]
“Nothing wrong with going to court. Americans do it all the time; we can do it too,” McConnell said.
The timing of the Republican anti-Obamacare lawsuit has helped Democrats campaign on healthcare. Twenty Republican state officials asked the courts to strike down Obamacare, arguing that it must fall because it is about to lose a key provision, namely the individual mandate requiring that people get insurance. The GOP tax law enacted in December zeroes out the penalty starting next year, rendering the mandate inoperative.
Adding to the political sensitivity of the issue, the Trump administration did not defend the law in court, but rather agreed with the plaintiffs, though it asked to toss only the rules on pre-existing conditions.
Centrist GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, both of whom voted against overhauling Obamacare last year, have criticized the lawsuit. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who worked with Democrats to help craft a bill to stabilize the markets in his role as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, called the Justice Department’s lawsuit “as far-fetched as any I’ve ever heard.”
Democrats have launched attack ads against Republicans invoking the lawsuit and actions by the Trump administration to weaken Obamacare. They have also raised the topic of the failed repeal efforts from 2017 and shared stories of their own medical conditions.
McConnell told Bloomberg that Republican candidates were able to handle the attack ads.
“There’s nobody in the Senate that I’m familiar with who is not in favor of coverage of pre-existing conditions,” he said.
In the face of the lawsuit, Republicans in the House and Senate have introduced bills to offer similar protections for pre-existing conditions as the ones in Obamacare, but Democrats have said they would fall short and make coverage unaffordable for the sick. Conservative Republicans are in favor of creating a high-risk pool which would funnel federal funds to states to pay for the sickest, most costly patients so that the rest of the people in the marketplace wouldn’t be affected.
