It looks like Cruz has a new idea for a way to solve the crisis in the Senate on getting enough Senators to vote for the new health care bill, and he’s gotten McConnell’s attention:
NY POST – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is working closely with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on an amendment that could solve Republicans’ health care woes, sources told The Post on Thursday.
Desperate to ink a deal to replace Obamacare, Cruz has urged McConnell to adjust the Senate bill to allow insurers to offer plans that do not comply with standards set forth under the 2010 health-care law while preserving existing plans on the individual market.
The amendment would satisfy a key conservative demand to improve consumer choice and give McConnell more leeway to court moderates with increased spending on Medicaid and fewer tax cuts for wealthy Americans.
Cruz, McConnell and several GOP senators huddled on Thursday with the Senate parliamentarian, an official tasked with advising the majority on whether a bill meets the upper chamber’s strict reconciliation rules, “to discuss the legality of including the amendment in the Byrd process,” according to a source familiar with the meeting.
The meeting came on the same day McConnell said his caucus is closer to devising a bill that satisfies enough GOP holdouts to ensure passage before the Senate departs for its six-week recess in August.
In an article tweeted out earlier today by Cruz himself, Vox describes the gist of the amendment like this:
Senate conservatives have been searching desperately for a way to unwind more of Obamacare’s insurance regulations as part of the chamber’s health care bill. They are withholding their support for the current leadership plan because it does not go far enough on that front.
It has been a vexing quest. Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions — the requirement that health plans cover every American regardless of health status and the prohibition on charging sick people more than healthy people — are overwhelmingly popular. That makes many less ideological senators skittish about rolling those regulations back. Then there is also the problem of the Senate procedural rules, which limit what policies Republicans can include in their plan.
Cruz, an anti-Obamacare firebrand who has staked much of his reputation on helping shepherd this health care bill through the Senate, has maybe/possibly found a compromise.
No legislative text of Cruz’s proposal is yet available, but this is the gist: As long as a health plan offered at least one Obamacare-compliant plan in a state, the plan would also be allowed to offer non-Obamacare-compliant plans in that state.
So instead of having a full free market competitive system (meaning Obamacare full repeal), it sounds like what Cruz’s compromise does is to create a free market system that competes with the onerous Obamacare system and letting patients decide which they choose.
Interesting compromise. I wonder if it will be good enough for all of these RINOs in the Senate who didn’t like the state waiver system in the House bill.