Paul: ‘Obamacare Lite’ Will Divide GOP

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blasted a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act proposed by GOP House leadership Tuesday, calling the bill “terrible, rotten, no-good Obamacare Lite,” during an interview on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Calling the House replacement bill entirely unacceptable to Republicans, the Kentucky senator predicted “conservatives across the country will be upset when they find out what’s in it.” Noting that the new bill keeps Obamacare subsidies by renaming them “refundable tax credits” and keeps the Obamacare taxes for a year and the Cadillac tax “forever,” Paul said he would never support the plan.

“It’s a terrible, rotten, no-good Obamacare Lite bill that every conservative in the country should write and call and say, ‘This is not what you ran on.'”

“It’s a terrible, rotten, no-good Obamacare Lite bill that every conservative in the country should write and call and say, ‘This is not what you ran on,'” Paul told LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham. “So when you’re talking about unity, Obamacare Lite will divide us. I promise you there’s enough conservatives to stop this.”

Noting that the House’s replacement bill keeps the individual mandate while shifting the penalty from “paying the government to paying the private insurance company,” Paul said he believes the shift “will be unconstitutional” and “probably jeopardizes all of repeal.”

Republicans are afraid of a full repeal, Paul said, because they don’t believe they can capture 60 votes in the Senate and because of the intense and highly publicized pushback they’ve received during town halls.

“I think a lot of the reason why people in Washington succumb to this notion is that they don’t have a sufficient admiration and believe that the market works,” Paul lamented.

“You know, we don’t have anybody directing the electronics market. We don’t have anybody directing most of the marketplace in our country, and yet the invisible hand of the profit motive allows, you know, the most amount of things to be sold at the least amount of price when supply and demand curves cross,” Paul added. “That is basic economics. It works if you leave people alone.”

Blaming Republicans for being driven by their “emotions” without thinking logically, Paul insisted that they should realize that “every federal intervention in the health care marketplace makes things worse and makes the cost higher.”

“And that’s why we have these outrageous premiums and we have really a system that is completely broken because the federal government’s involved in it,” Paul said.

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Paul noted that House and Senate conservatives are convening today to reintroduce their version of a “nearly full repeal” put together and voted unanimously upon by Republicans roughly a year ago.

“What we’re asking for is something that united all Republicans. For six years all Republicans have called for a complete repeal. We voted on what we thought was about as complete a repeal as we could get about a year ago, and everybody voted for it,” Paul said. “So we’re not asking for something unusual. We’re just asking to vote on what we’ve already all voted on in the past.”

“If the House Freedom Caucus stays together and the Senate conservative caucus stays together, we can have a negotiation,” Paul added. “And the negotiation will be let’s vote for what we voted on previously.”