Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Charlie Dent said he still has reservations about voting for the Obamacare repeal bill, citing the lack of details on how they plan to replace President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare legislation.
The House is slated to vote Friday on the Senate-passed procedural measure allowing Republican lawmakers to move forward with repealing Obamacare. While GOP leadership is confident it will pass, Dent, who hasn’t confirmed how he plans to vote, said he isn’t the only member with concerns.
“What’ driving me, what’s driving my concerns is the fact that we don’t have a well enough defined replacement package, and I want to have a better sense of what that replacement plan looks like prior to initiating this process,” he told reporters Thursday. “In fact, before we take this plane in the air we better have a damn good idea of where we’re going to land it — right now I’m not sure how we’re going to land.”
Dent said he would like to see leadership delay the vote until the conference can have an in-depth conversation about the best way to tackle the issue, adding they are “not going to resolve them by tomorrow”
“I would prefer that we hold this vote off until after the retreat in Philadelphia — we get the House, Senate, President-elect Trump’s team to discuss just what the basic elements of the replacement package will look like,” he continued. “What’s going to be in the repeal, what’s not going to be in the repeal. And not only talk about the policy and making sure that people who are currently being subsidized continue to be covered, but we should also be talking about making sure the insurance markets will adjust during this transition.”
Dent said he fears if they repeal it without a replacement, the party will struggle to pass the replacement package due to party politics.
Moving the vote date “is not even under discussion,” a GOP leadership aide told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, who has also expressed concerns about the vagueness of the plan, said leadership suggested passing two separate measures within a close time frame. The reconciliation bill being used to repeal the ACA, which only requires a simple majority to pass the Senate, would likely have parts of the replacement attached followed by a second measure with the rest of the replacement language.
Like Dent, Meadows is unsure a replacement bill will make it through the upper chamber.
“Do I believe it could get consensus in the Senate? I’m not very optimistic that we’ll get 60 votes in the Senate,” he told reporters.
With Trump’s call to repeal and replace concurrently, pressure is mounting on Congress to act.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said he and the incoming administration are “in sync ” in terms of their goals for healthcare reform, adding that once the repeal bill is passed, the respective committees will start work on putting together the details.
“As you know, I like to run a bottom-up process that’s collaborative here in Congress,” he told reporters at his weekly press conference Thursday. “We’re going to work with all of our committees that are in charge of health-care legislation — the Education and Workforce Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, the Commerce Committee — and we’re going to have a full exhausting conversation at the retreat to go through all of these things.”
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