President Donald Trump’s budget director said Friday that Republicans’ health care bill would shift decisions such as whether to cover maternity care to states — and if voters don’t like them, they should change their state laws.
“States not only have the ability to require those services — many of them already do,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said on CBS’s “This Morning.” “What we’re doing is taking away the federal controls of the system.”
A common criticism of Obamacare is that the federal law mandates 10 “essential health benefits,” including maternity and newborn care, mental health services and prescription drugs, be covered, often resulting in requiring recipients to pay for coverage they don’t need.
“If you live in a state that wants to mandate maternity coverage for everybody, including 60-year-old women, that’s fine,” added Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina.
“But what if you live in a state that doesn’t do that?” asked CBS’s Alex Wagner.
“Then you can figure out a way to change the state that you live in,” Mulvaney replied.
“So you should move?”
“They could try to change their own state legislatures and state laws,” Mulvaney said. “Why do we look to the federal government to fix our local problems? That’s one of the big problems of Obamacare.”
“They took that one size fits all and crammed it down on the entire country,” Mulvaney added.
House GOP leaders have agreed to change the Obamacare provision that guarantees all health insurers cover services such as maternity, mental health and prescription drugs in hopes of wooing conservative lawmakers to their side.
The 10 “essential health benefits” requirement has made coverage more comprehensive and prevented insurers from selling skimpy plans that were cheap. But these policies didn’t offer many benefits — often leaving consumers with big bills if they needed care.