Washington—This morning, Reps. David Brat, Gary Palmer and Mark Sanford voted against the American Health Care Act (AHCA) in the House Budget Committee because the bill would leave Obamacare's core regulatory architecture in place. Heritage Action released the following statement from Chief Executive Officer Michael A. Needham:
"Congressmen Brat, Palmer and Sanford deserve tremendous credit for standing firm in their conviction that repeal must be repeal. Republicans promised their constituents that they would repeal Obamacare and do everything they can to drive down the cost of health insurance for Americans struggling under Obamacare. The AHCA falls far short of that promise."
As Heritage Action's Needham and Jacob Reses wrote Wednesday for National Review, "Conservatives are anxious to repeal Obamacare, but repeal must be repeal." Needham and Reses continued:
"Rather than build from that floor to full repeal, the architects of the House bill have instead aimed to renovate America's Obamacare-era insurance markets from the ceiling down by combining repeal and replace. The danger of this approach, conservatives feared, was always that it would be built on a shaky floor. And in the case of the AHCA, it is.
"Obamacare's beating heart was its regulatory structure: the benefit mandates, the one-size-fits-all community-rating rules, the limits on pricing structure and rules about where cost burdens must fall, and the federal review of decisions about insurance markets that can be handled perfectly well in the states."