Republican Rep. Pat Meehan said Thursday that his House colleagues were “doing some of the very things that we criticized the Democrats for doing with Obamacare” in their attempts to repeal and replace the law.
Meehan made the case that Republicans were rushing the bill to a vote on “The Dom Giordano Program” on 1210 WPHT Philadelphia radio hours before the American Health Care Act narrowly passed the House by a vote of 217-213. Meehan joined 19 other Republicans in voting against it.
“We’re doing some of the very things that we criticized the Democrats for doing with Obamacare,” he said. “Here we have a bill that is going to touch one-fifth of the US economy and as you said the health and welfare of a lot of people, particularly our sickest people and we don’t even have a score for it. We don’t even know what the CBO is gonna say it actually costs or will do of the form of who’s gonna get covered and who’s not covered.”
He continued, “You know, we’ve got to, I think, yes, Dom, I think this bill is going to pass but a lot of the same kinds of things in which every night we wake up and there was a new deal that’d been cut somewhere in a back room with different people putting things on. So when we talk policy with something of this magnitude, getting it right is more important than getting it done immediately.”
In the interview, Meehan noted that he voted the bill out of the House Ways and Means Committee.
“I’m saying against what I actually did, I sit on the Ways and Means committee and I voted this bill out of Ways and Means,” he said. “We all took that vote, and I stood behind it without us knowing the score there, but that’s what you do when you’re on that committee and you continue to move the ball forward so that we can get the process and I think that’s what you were saying.”
Meehan also noted his policy objections to the bill, arguing that though repealing the Affordable Care Act has been key Republican promise, this replacement does not adequately fund insurance for sick customers.
“After it passes we’re still going to have the bucket full of problems that haven’t been resolved,” Meehan said. “So I can tell everybody I went charging up the hill and we shut it down but it’s gonna be on their doorstep, the implications of this, most specifically, the sickest people but then the taxpayers.”