With Republicans on Capitol Hill no closer to coalescing around an Obamacare replacement plan, and angry constituents and liberal activists staging protests at G.O.P. town halls across the country, former House Speaker John Boehner says there is little chance the party can successfully repeal Barack Obama’s signature health-care law this year—let alone replace it.
“It’s not going to happen,” Boehner said Thursday while speaking at a health-care conference in Orlando, Florida, Politico reports. He dismissed claims by Donald Trump and G.O.P. leadership that Congress will successfully “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act by the end of the year, calling the prospect mere “happy talk.”
Boehner told the crowd on Thursday that he “started laughing” when congressional Republicans, ecstatic after Trump’s unexpected election triumph, predicted that they would rapidly repeal and replace Obamacare. “Republicans never ever agree on health care,” said Boehner, who resigned in 2015 from his House leadership role amid widespread turmoil in the party.
Instead, Boehner—like President Obama—said he thinks much of the controversial Affordable Care Act will survive the next four years. “[Congressional Republicans are] going to fix Obamacare—I shouldn’t call it repeal-and-replace, because it’s not going to happen,” he said. “Most of the framework of the Affordable Care Act . . . that’s going to be there.”
Boehner’s remarks come amid a widening rift on the right over how to dismantle Obama’s sweeping health-care law, with hard-line conservatives in Congress breaking with their more moderate peers. “I think a lot of people are looking to some of the policy debates to be an excuse not to vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act,” House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows, who is among a vocal faction of congressmen pushing for an aggressive repeal plan, said in an interview last week.
Meadows’s fears are not unfounded. One Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has indicated that she is prepared to break ranks if the G.O.P.’s repeal strategy also rolls back Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which has helped millions of low-income people across the country gain access to health coverage—including many in red states. Murkowski told Alaskan lawmakers on Wednesday that she “will not support a reckless repeal process” of the Affordable Care Act that curtails the Medicaid program so long as her state’s legislature wants to keep it, Alaska Dispatch News reports. With Republicans controlling the Senate by a 52-48 margin, it would take only two more Republicans joining Murkowski to put the G.O.P.’s current plan on life support.
