Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski helped doom the GOP’s efforts to repeal Obamacare over the summer by voting against a bill that would have repealed the law’s individual mandate.
Now Alaska’s Murkowski and Maine’s Collins are backing a repeal of the mandate’s penalties.
Murkowski said Wednesday she would support the overall tax reform bill that would repeal the penalties, while Collins still has some lingering demands that include adding a $10,000 property tax deduction. Collins has said she opposes the mandate but didn’t want it to be included in tax reform, and has called for a commitment to bring up two Obamacare stabilization bills to buffer any impact on premiums from mandate repeal.
Both senators approved a procedural motion on Wednesday to start debate on the bill.
Collins and Murkowski said separately that the “skinny” repeal bill included more than just repeal of the individual mandate, which requires everyone to buy health insurance or pay a penalty. The senators joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who said Thursday he would back the tax legislation, and all Senate Democrats to defeat the measure in late July. They also opposed a last-ditch effort in September to repeal and replace Obamacare.
“The skinny repeal bill had many other provisions in it,” Collins said. “It repealed the employer mandate, eliminated funding for Planned Parenthood and had many other provisions and so it is not comparable at all [to mandate repeal].”
Murkowski made similar remarks.
“It was far more than the individual mandate,” she said.
Murkowski said in a statement outlining her support for the tax bill that it “removes the tax penalty for those who do not wish to purchase health insurance that they cannot afford or that offers little value to them.”
Collins said the individual mandate fines individuals who choose not to have insurance, and said that 80 percent of the fines are paid by people who make less than $50,000 a year.
“So those fines are falling disproportionately on middle and low-income Americans,’ she said.
Collins has pushed for the Senate to take up two Obamacare stabilization bills separately from tax reform to blunt higher premiums expected from repealing the mandate’s penalties.
One bill from Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., would make Obamacare insurer payments for two years in exchange for more flexibility for states to waive Obamacare regulations.
A second bill sponsored by Collins and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., would provide $4.5 billion to states over two years to set up reinsurance programs that help Obamacare exchange insurers lower the cost of the highest medical claims. The intent is that insurers would lower premiums for everyone else as a result.
However, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Wednesday that the Alexander-Murray bill would not provide enough help to mitigate the impact of repealing the mandate. The estimate did not evaluate Collins and Nelson’s bill.
The CBO previously estimated mandate repeal would raise premiums by 10 percent and lead to 13 million people foregoing insurance.
Alexander pushed back on the estimate. He said Wednesday that CBO said in August that not paying the insurer payments would cause a 25 percent spike in premiums by 2020.
“The Alexander-Murray bill pays cost-sharing reduction payments for two years, which should prevent that 25 percent increase,” he said.
