House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Thursday would not say how quickly he would like Congressional Republicans to replace Obamacare after they repeal the health care law.
“We’ll get to that next year,” Ryan told reporters when asked how long the transition away from Obamacare would be. “We just had a meeting with all our authorizers this morning about working on this with the Senate and the transition team. Those talks are ongoing.”
Republicans in the Senate are considering waiting three years after repealing Obamacare to fully replace it. But the incoming leader of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), has come out against that plan and said that he would prefer replacing the law within two years. Meadows argued that waiting three years would put an unfair burden on the next Congress after the 2018 elections.
When asked about concern from members about waiting for three years during a press briefing, Ryan would not offer his preference.
“We’re going to have these kinds of conversations. I don’t have an opinion on exactly what that timeline will be,” he said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, and we have a lot of dialogue that we have to have with just our friends in the Senate and with the White House on the transition. So it’s just premature to suggest that we know how exactly long this transition is.”
The speaker did emphasize that he believes any Obamacare replacement plan will need some sort of transition.
“There needs to be a reasonable transition so that people don’t have the rug pulled out from under them,” he said at the press briefing Thursday. “And that is obviously something we intend on doing.”
Of course Eddie doesn’t know how long it will take. Like his numberless budgets, this plan contains no dates (or numbers or ideas or propositions or …).
Based on their motivations, I’d say infinity² is in the ballpark.
You can almost see it coming. We all know they aren’t going to want to actually see Obamacare go away with their fingers on it, so 2 years or three years they will kick the can down the road for a year or maybe 6 months at a time. In the meantime they will have to pay insurance companies billions to keep them in the mix. This repeal crap is simply a way to move more money to the insurance industry.
If Democrats had a pair they would start working today to win in 2018 and then pass single payer as a low cost alternative to TrumpCare.
It’s time rAyn become acquainted with his spine, or he’ll just be a groveling Boy Scout for the rest of his miserable life.
@sooner This could be the Onion followup to Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.
Last In His Class Student President Wins The Right to Steer the Nation Into a Ditch.
@steviedee111
Right now the 48 Democratic senators represent 55.33% of the people in this country. We’d have to have nearly a 100% Democratic senate to get anything done. At the same time it will take 60 votes to confirm someone to SCOTUS so they’d better pay us a little respect between now and then.