Paul Ryan Makes Big Admission: Republicans Helped Write Obamacare
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/03/13/1710231/paul-ryan-makes-big-admission-republicans-helped-write-obamacare/
Days after top House Republicans asked President Obama to expand a provision in the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted on Wednesday that the ACA incorporates provisions that Republicans “have always been talking about,” including solutions he himself proposed in 2009.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ryan singled out state-based exchanges and high-risk insurance pools, both of which Democrats included in the final law after months of negotiations with Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee. The exchanges or new regulated marketplaces for insurance will go online by 2014, while the temporary high risk pool program for individuals and families with pre-existing conditions has enrolled more than 100,000 people, but stopped accepting new applicants in February.
The House Budget Chairman — who on Tuesday introduced a measure that would repeal most of the health care law — claimed that the administration “screwed” the Republican-backed proposals and “destroyed” them, pointing to a 2009 bill he offered with Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) as a plan to fix the broken health care system:
RYAN: Look, exchanges at the state level is something we have always been talking about. Tom Coburn and I had a bill. I think they have kind of messed up the idea of exchanges but the idea from conservative standpoint is a revived idea that can work. The other thing is high risk pools. They screwed the high risk pools and didn’t work in Obamacare but a way of making them work from our minds to make sure that people with preexisting conditions can get considerable health insurance. We think some in that law were destroyed but revive those things in an effort to replacing the law.