Speaker of the House John Boehner and President Obama seem to have very different ideas about what it means to work together for the next two years, especially when it comes to Obamacare.
Boehner promised that the House will vote once again next year to repeal Obamacare, as well as vote on dismantling certain pieces of the law, during a press conference Thursday. He said the House would easily have enough votes to pass a repeal bill, but said that even with the majority he wasn’t sure it would pass the Senate.
In that case, he listed three provisions of Obamacare he would work to get rid of outside of a full repeal of the law.
“Just because we might not be able to get everything we want doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get what we can,” Boehner said. “…There are bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate to take some of these issues out of ObamaCare. We need to put them on the president’s desk and let him choose.”
The things he would get rid of include the medical device tax and the Independent Payment Advisory Board. He also promised to take on the individual mandate, in direct contrast to Obama’s speech Wednesday. Obama called it “a line I can’t cross.”
“On health care, there are certainly some lines I’m going to draw. Repeal of the law I won’t sign. Efforts that would take away health care from the 10 million people who now have it and the millions more who are eligible to get it we’re not going to support. In some cases there may be recommendations that Republicans have for changes that would undermine the structure of the law, and I’ll be very honest with them about that and say, look, the law doesn’t work if you pull out that piece or that piece,” Obama said at his post-election press conference.
“The individual mandate is a line I can’t cross because the concept, borrowed from Massachusetts, from a law instituted by a former opponent of mine, Mitt Romney, understood that if you’re providing health insurance to people through the private marketplace, then you’ve got to make sure that people can’t game the system and just wait until they get sick before they go try to buy health insurance. You can’t ensure that people with preexisting conditions can get health insurance unless you also say, while you’re healthy, before you need it, you’ve got to get health insurance.”
