Health Care Debate Descends into GOP Civil War

Conservatives on Wednesday blasted moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives for failing to negotiate a deal to repeal Obamacare, as internal strife threatened to scuttle the latest attempt to resurrect health reform.

Mike Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, said members of the moderate Tuesday Group have refused even to back a proposal that would keep the basic structure of the Affordable Care Act in place while giving states broad leeway to opt out of provisions if they choose to.

“The truth is that the Tuesday Group is not opposed to this based on policy. They’re opposed because they do not want to repeal Obamacare.”

“The truth is that the Tuesday Group is not opposed to this based on policy,” he told reporters on a conference call. “They’re opposed because they do not want to repeal Obamacare. They do not believe in policy innovation coming from states. And they do not believe in the basic premises of the Republican Party. They also do not believe their own rhetoric.”

A spokesman for Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), co-chairman of the Tuesday Group, did not immediately respond to a question from LifeZette seeking comment.

Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner, who has lobbied for a market-oriented replacement for Obamacare, told LifeZette on Wednesday that House leaders and the White House are working hard for a bill that can pass. She said Republicans need to stop firing on one another.

“This finger-pointing is just so not helpful,” she said.

Turner acknowledged that making too many concessions to the conservative wing of the party will lose moderates, and vice versa.

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“The art of legislating is to find that place where everyone is satisfied,” she said. “There probably would have been [consensus] if they were dealing with a clean slate. They’re not. Part of it, whether they like it or not, is rescuing Obamacare … Doing that on top of all the land mines Obamacare put there is much, much more difficult.”

Needham said conservatives already have swallowed bitter pills in an effort to reach a deal. He said members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus gave up a demand to eliminate costly regulations and mandates on insurance companies. Instead, Freedom Caucus members on Monday expressed an openness to keeping the mandates but granting states great flexibility in opting out.

“Accepting this plan was another concession from conservatives, who have accepted one compromise after another over the past several weeks,” he said.

Rather than the approach conservatives prefer, Needham said, the compromise plan would have “kept the heavy-handed regulatory architecture of Obamacare in place and would have allowed states to apply for permission from Washington, D.C., if they wanted to innovate.”

Needham said a bill along those lines would have won more than 20 new “yes” votes from Freedom Caucus members whose opposition to the House Republican-backed American Health Care Act helped kill the initiative last month.

Inexplicably, Needham said, talk on Tuesday moved toward an “extraordinarily disappointing narrowing” of the waiver proposal.

“It is now clear the deal has been taken off the table,” he said. “It’s been replaced by an extremely scaled-down version that in some ways is the left of the failed AHCA, and this happened because of the intransigence of the Tuesday Group, which refuses to get to ‘yes.’”

David McIntosh, president of the conservative interest group Club for Growth, also accused moderates of torpedoing an emerging deal.

“The left wing among House Republicans doesn’t want to compromise or keep their pledge to voters to repeal Obamacare,” he said in a statement. “They’ve rejected deals that would give Americans more choices for cheaper health insurance, and now they won’t even allow states the chance to scale back Obamacare’s costliest regulations.”

Needham said the compromise that moderates rejected would have allowed, say New Jersey, to keep coverage mandates under Obamacare while allowing other states to experiment with different rules designed to bring down the cost of insurance.

He called on House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to get moderate members in line.

“The job of leadership is to whip them and get them on board, because this is a plan that is a clear win-win for everybody,” he said.

Needham said he believes that is doable. He said he has been told there are only five to seven hard “no” votes in the Tuesday Group. Strong leadership could bring the others around, he suggested.

Thus far, he said, he has not been impressed by the efforts of House Republican leaders.

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It is unclear how many states would be interested in waivers that would allow them to depart dramatically from the current law since nearly all of the money spent under Obamacare comes from the federal government. But Needham said pressure to act will be strong in states experiencing the most pullouts by insurance companies.

Five state and a third of counties now have only one insurance company participating in government-run exchanges, and premiums are climbing at a rapid clip.

“The incentive is they want functional insurance markets,” he said. “Obamacare has totally destroyed insurance markets through this country. And I think that if governors think they can do a better job and if they can provide functional insurance markets, they would put forward a plan to do that. They would get a waiver. And then they would get grants to help stabilize the market on top of that.”