Obamacare is the “biggest bait and switch in history” a trio of House Republicans said in the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast, which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter.
Reps. Eric Burlison (R., Mo.), Kevin Hern (R., Okla.), and Michael Cloud (R., Texas) didn’t plan to be in Congress, but each had a set of circumstances that led to them successfully running for office. All three had lengthy and distinguished careers in the private sector in their respective states, and they leaned on that background in discussing what Burlison called the “monumental crisis” of Obamacare.
All three lawmakers are members of the RSC, which has established itself as a leading voice as Republicans deliberate what a second reconciliation would look like. Tackling health care is at the forefront of those discussions, alongside issues like homeownership, as the Reporter has previously covered.
Hern said that the Democrats’ problems with health care dates back to the Clinton administration, when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton tried to pass “HillaryCare,” and it was a “miserable failure.”
“Obama learned from that, and he set us on a pathway with some really smart policy riders knowing that this would collapse the system,” Hern said. “He told everybody that your health care costs would go down, your access would be better, that you’d get more doctors, that you’d keep your doctor. All of that turned out to be very false, as we’re seeing today, 15 years later…We’ve had fewer people get into the medical field. We have less access in rural America, and our premiums have skyrocketed 100 percent and are continuing to grow. And now we really have a health care crisis…there were some 25 to 30 million uninsured Americans, for everybody’s reference back then. Today, there’s still 25 to 30 million uninsured Americans.”
Hern was a witness to Obamacare’s failures as a McDonald’s franchisee, and when President Joe Biden took office he saw the Democrats “destroy” health care in America.
“The Biden administration added on with the COVID-era premium tax credits,” Hern said. “We’ve got to quit throwing money at it. And we’ve got to structurally change it. We’ve got to structurally make it more affordable for all Americans, not just a few million.”
Cloud described America’s health care system as a “classic case of if the government steps in, it actually creates a problem instead of fixing it, and then says the solution is more government.
And this is a case where the bill was written by insurance companies. So guess who it benefited? Insurance companies…It’s really been about health insurance. Obamacare didn’t bring care to people. It didn’t open up access to care. It got more people on insurance rolls. Well, insurance isn’t care. The American people want access to care. They want to be able to have access to know what they’re going to pay for it, and to know where the price is going to be, to not have to wrestle with this insurance giant that you’re having to deal with when you’re trying to get access to care. It’s a very complicated system that puts quite a burden on the American people just trying to get access to care. And it certainly hasn’t made anything affordable. It’s made everything a lot more expensive.”
Cloud also criticized the vertical integration that he claims that insurance companies promised under the failed premise that it would lower costs. “There’s this idea and this concept that was pushed really by the insurance companies. They said ‘if we manage this and we kind of have our finger in the hole every step of the chain, we’ll be able to lower cost because we’re overseeing everything.’ Well, that’s not been the case at all. Their profits have gone sky high. Prices for care have gone sky high, and the American people are left holding the bag and then having to wrestle through the process that’s defined and controlled by the insurance companies.”
The lawmakers laid out a series of problems with Obamacare, and Burlison said that he “honestly welcome[s] this fight,” because it could give the GOP conference “an opportunity to actually fix Obamacare.” Burlison said that Rep. Jodey Arrington (R., Texas) calls health care the GOP’s “away game,” and he is tired of staying on the sidelines for it.
“I just think we’re more comfortable talking about taxes,” Hern said. When it comes to health care, he added, “we’re such free market advocates that we want people to have their own money and compete in the free market to be able to buy their own health insurance….Why do we think the American people are so stupid that they can’t even buy their own health insurance? We need to get money back into their pockets through HSAs. “
For Burlison, the distinction between health insurance and health care is key. “I’ve never talked to anybody who wants insurance,” he said. “They want health care. They want the end product. Nobody likes giving their money to insurance. They want the outcome. And yet we’ve made it so convoluted.”
“We’ve allowed the messaging to become insurance is care and it’s not you can have care without insurance,” Cloud said. “Now, insurance has a role and it has a proper place. But if we’re going to say we’re having a health care discussion, it should be about how to provide access to care to the American people.”
Toward the end of the episode, Hern broadened the conversation beyond health insurance. He noted that President Donald Trump has “worked on” reforming topics like the pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and site neutrality for hospitals.
Hern also singled out the 340B hospital programs for criticism for waste. “We have to tear this entire system down,” he said. “We have to have hearings. This is all hands on deck. Going back to what Congressman Arrington said, this is the time now for Republicans to be in the center of this, to figure out a solution going forward and figure out what the issue is.”
“What RSC is doing by stepping up and saying, ‘we need to go big, we need to do something that is a sea change that benefits the American people and not tinker’” is important.
Hern, a former RSC chair, added that Rep. August Pfluger (R., Texas), the current chair, is “doing a fantastic job” helming the caucus.
The RSC’s latest episode, and the rest of the catalogue, can be found here.
