The Heritage Foundation’s political action wing is pressuring the Republican presidential contenders to put Obamacare front-and-center in the 2016 election season, now that Congress is poised to send a major repeal bill to President Obama for the first time ever.
All of the GOP candidates have said they’d strive to repeal the healthcare law should they win the White House. But in a letter sent to the campaigns on Tuesday, the conservative activist group urged them to make an “ironclad” commitment to using every tool available to ditch the law — even if Democrats retain enough Senate seats to filibuster Republicans.
“An ironclad commitment to repeal the entire law will keep Obamacare and its disastrous side effects at the forefront of the campaign,” wrote Heritage Action’s Chief Executive Officer Michael Needham.
The House is scheduled to pass a bill on Wednesday which repeals major parts of the Affordable Care Act using special budget reconciliation rules allowing them to bypass a Democratic Senate filibuster. Obama has said he’ll veto the bill, but the legislation still represents a big moment for Republicans by laying out which parts of Obamacare they might be able to ditch should a Republican become president next year.
Heritage Action, whose initial resistance to the repeal bill helped force Republicans to make it broader, wants the contenders to promise they’d take some specific steps once in office to repeal as much of the law as possible.
The next administration should “use every executive power at its disposal to halt the implementation of Obamacare-related federal regulation of the insurance market,” Needham wrote. He also wrote that a Republican president should ensure the vice president presides over the Senate “to guarantee complete and full repeal is achieved through the reconciliation process” and should sign a “complete and full repeal” of the healthcare law.
But it could be difficult or impossible for a Republican president and Congress to repeal the law’s regulations on insurers, as it’s up to the Senate parlimentarian to say which provisions in the law fall under the scope of a budget reconciliation bill.
If the parlimentarian ruled that the insurer regulations — or any other part of Obamacare — can’t be included in a budget reconciliation bill, there would be little Republicans could do to repeal those parts of the law.
