House GOP Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA) said Sunday that if the Supreme Court strikes down ‘Obamacare’ this month, Republicans would look to solve the resulting health care challenges without government mandates.
“Whatever the Court does will dictate what kind of response [we have],” he said on CSPAN. “My sense is there won’t be significant disruption in the real world immediately, almost regardless of what the court does. A lot of the things that have been put in place are contracts — so they’re contracts between an employer and an insurance company, or an employee and an insurance company. And that contract — as I understand it, the experts that we’ve talked to — stands regardless of what the court does.”
“Depending on what disruptions are out there [for patients, we’ll] determine the best course of action,” Price said.
Then he offered a hint on how he hopes to approach the challenges.
“We believe that there are wonderful solutions to fix the challenges in health care that don’t require putting Washington in charge — whether it’s getting folks covered or solving the insurance challenges of portability and pre-existing [conditions], or saving hundreds of billions of dollars. We can do all those things without putting the politicians or bureaucrats here in Washington in charge.”
Asked how he would pay for those fixes without an individual mandate, a problem that health policy experts often point to, Price said: “The savings — there’s so much waste in health care right now.”
His remarks come as Republicans privately consider supporting some of the more popular concepts in ‘Obamacare’ in a potential replacement plan, if the law is overturned.
