Rand Blasts Ryan’s ‘My Way or the Highway’ Attitude on Health Care

A leading conservative critic of the House GOP leadership plan to replace Obamacare kept up his barrage against the bill Friday, taking Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to task for insisting it is the only choice.

Ryan on Thursday delivered a PowerPoint presentation on the American Health Care Act to reporters, saying that members of Congress will have a “binary choice” of keeping the Affordable Care Act or adopting the alternative.

“That’s a fancy way of saying, ‘Take it or leave it; my way or the highway.'”

“That’s a fancy way of saying, ‘Take it or leave it; my way or the highway,'” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Paul challenged Ryan’s assertion that Republicans ran on his plan.

“Obamacare Lite is not what we ran on,” he said. “He says we all ran on his plan. I just ran for election. I didn’t run on Obamacare Lite, I promise you that.”

Paul said the House bill keeps Obamacare taxes, subsidies, a provision to bail out insurance companies, and a mandate to buy insurance. That last provision refers to a requirement that people pay a penalty if they let their insurance lapse and try to sign back up again.

Paul said any reform will fail if it does not address the underlying defect that is crippling Obamacare — the provision that lets people wait until they are sick before buying insurance.

“The problem with that is that people do then wait to buy until after they’re sick, and the marketplace become overloaded with just those who are unhealthy and not those who are healthy,” he said. “That’s what they call the ‘death spiral’ of Obamacare.”

Paul also dismissed as a red herring Ryan’s insistence that a full replacement cannot occur in the bill because the changes would not conform to a parliamentary rule requiring only 51 votes in the Senate instead of 60. He agreed parts of a replacement need to take place in a separate bill. But he said Congress should pass the companion bill at the same time it passes the repeal legislation — not months down the road.

“That is a misdirection ploy on their part,” he said. “The things we object to in their bill are not things that can’t be added because of the budget rules. These are things that they’ve added.”

Paul suggested that no action is preferable to the bill that Ryan is pushing. If it became law, the senator predicted, it would fail as surely as Obamacare is failing.

“But now it’s called Republican Care, and so I don’t want my fingers or my name associated with something that’s not gonna work.”

Paul’s plan calls for the creation of co-ops and insurance associations. Those vehicles could both protect people with pre-existing conditions and increase the purchasing power of people buying insurance on the individual market. He gave the example of a farmer whose health insurance bill might huge but would be much lower if he were part of a group that included all 1 million farmers in America.

“The consumer will be king, and the insurance companies will have to come to us on bended knee … with a better, cheaper, less expensive product,” he said. “The insurance companies will hate [it] ’cause we’ll drive the prices down and the consumer, the patient, will be king again.”

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Paul noted that he has spoken to the president twice this week.

“He’s open to negotiation on this,” he said. “I think that the realization that conservatives hate Obamacare Lite, the plan that’s come out of the House, is apparent all across America.”