Boehner: There Will Be No Democrat Health Reform
Sep 18, 2009 5 Comments ›› Erik Wong
House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) stressed Thursday night that none of the healthcare bills advanced recently by Democrats — including Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mont.) new proposal — “can pass in any way, shape or form.”
Rather, Democrats would be more likely to secure GOP votes if they hit the debate’s “reset” button, said Boehner, who first made that suggestion during Congress’s August recess.
“Well, there clearly are some things in [the Baucus bill] that Republicans do support,” Boehner told PBS’s NewsHour. “But when you step back and look at this, it still has a big government takeover of our healthcare system, whether it’s the co-ops, whether it’s the mandates on individuals, the mandates on companies, the unfunded mandates on states, and still costs some $800 billion of money that we don’t have.”
Opposition to Baucus’s healthcare plan — an effort that, all told, will be deficit-neutral and cover 29 million more Americans by 2019 — has been staunch since the Finance Committee chairman debuted it on Wednesday. A number of Democrats fret its lack of a public option, many Republicans dislike the bill’s provision for co-ops and lawmakers on both sides seem unhappy with the proposal’s taxes on medical device manufacturers and high-cost insurance plans.
Lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee will air their grievances with the bill next week during its scheduled markup. A handful of the committee’s Republicans, including Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), have even signaled their interest in working with Baucus to produce something more agreeable to both parties. But GOP leaders remain skeptical of whether markup will produce anything viable enough to clear the Senate and the House and survive a conference committee.
“They’re at the table, but I don’t think, from what I can see, that it’s going to garner any Republican support,” Boehner said on Thursday. “There’s just way too much government involvement here. We don’t need all this government involvement to make our current system work better.”
