“Let’s do clean repeal [of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)] in one piece of legislation,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Fox News Sunday in an interview with Chris Wallace.
Describing the American Health Care Act (AHCA) as “Obamacare-light,” Jordan said President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) joint proposal did not fulfill the first part of the “repeal and replace” Republican commitment.
Jordan, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), described the HFC’s role in blocking the AHCA’s advancement as amounting to a “favor” for Americans:
“Remember [the AHCA], seventeen percent of the country approved this bill. Maybe the fact that we opposed it, we did the country a favor because this bill didn’t repeal Obamacare. This bill didn’t do what we told the American people we were going to do.”
Jordan called for a piecemeal approach to reforming federal health care policies, beginning with a “clean repeal” of the ACA. “Market-oriented health care,” he added, was necessary to “bring down the cost of [health insurance policy] premiums.”
Governmental central planning in Washington, D.C., said Jordan, amounts to an inflexible “one-size-fits-all mandate” that cannot fulfill the myriad health care and insurance needs of Americans.
Wallace described federal mandates on health insurance companies to cover “pre-existing conditions” as “protections.” He also implied that the number of persons with health insurance is a valuable metric in grading a national health care system’s quality. Wallace did not consider the deleterious consequences of such socialistic policies.
In a March 8 interview with Mark Levin, Jordan said: “[Republicans] told [voters] we’re gonna repeal Obamacare, not keep the taxes, not keep the Medicaid expansion … we told them we were going to repeal it. So let’s repeal it. Let’s do what we said.” The AHCA, he said, “is not what we told the voters we were going to do when they elected us in 2010, 2014, and 2016.”
Jordan also criticized the status quo of governmental controls over health care and insurance, calling for free market reforms for both:
“Bring back a marketplace so we can bring back affordable insurance for families across the country … we have forgotten what a marketplace looks like in health care. We’ve got so much government involvement, and [the AHCA] – I don’t think – changes that. This plan, I think, continues this idea that we’re going to have subsidies chasing unaffordable insurance. It’s like chasing your tail, and it keeps spiraling upward, much like we’ve seen in higher education, where the more government involvement, the higher the cost of tuition … That’s what we’ve created in health care.”
Earlier Sunday, President Donald Trump tweeted that the HFC, along with the Heritage Foundation and Club For Growth, assisted the Democrats’ political agenda:
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