The Trump administration will release a plan to replace Obamacare in the coming months, Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said Wednesday.
“The administration will continue to come forward with more free-market reforms that we think will continue to lower the price of healthcare,” Short said on MSNBC.
The plan is intended as a backup if federal courts rule in favor of the Trump administration and decide that all of Obamacare should be thrown out as a result of Congress zeroing out the tax on the uninsured. Short said Trump would only support legislation that included protections for pre-existing conditions, as Obamacare does, though he didn’t lay out any details of what that might look like.
“You should rest assured that 20 million Americans will certainly not be without health insurance,” he said, responding to a question about how many people would be expected to become uninsured if the healthcare law were to be thrown out in its entirety.
In the coming months, and as the case is being litigated, there will be “plenty of time” to come up with an alternative, which would come out of the Department of Health and Human Services, he said.
Republicans in the Senate have indicated they are not interested in revisiting Obamacare after running afoul of public opinion in trying to repeal the law in 2017 and then losing the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections. Short nevertheless argued that healthcare could be a winning issue for the GOP, noting in the past they had won elections on the promises to repeal and replace Obamacare over the course of nine years.
Ultimately, Republicans came several votes short of fulfilling their promises, and they have been unable to coalesce around a specific plan. Democrats exploited the failure and credit campaigning on healthcare as key to securing a House majority during the midterm elections.
