Getty Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to reporters during a news conference on Capitol Hill following a procedural vote on the GOP health care bill on July 25, 2017 in Washington, DC.
On Wednesday afternoon, the United States Senate is voting on a proposal to repeal Obamacare. This is the third Affordable Care Act related vote that the Senate has held over the past 24 hours, so what exactly is the Senate voting on this afternoon? Are they about to successfully repeal the Affordable Care Act?
The Senate today is voting on what’s informally known as “repeal and delay.” This is an amendment proposed by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
If repeal and delay were to be successful, much of Obamacare would be scaled back. The individual and employer mandates would be repealed, the Medicaid expansion and the health care subsidies would be ended, and many of the law’s taxes would be rolled back.
However, this would not take effect for two years (although the mandate repeal would happen immediately). The idea is that during those two years, Republicans would come up with an Obamacare replacement plan, and so the repeal vote would happen immediately but the replacement part wouldn’t come until later.
The Senate actually passed this in 2015, but that was more of a symbolic gesture, as everyone knew that President Obama was going to veto the bill. However, with President Trump in office, this same proposal being passed today would be signed into law.
Indeed, President Trump himself has advocated for the repeal and delay idea in the past. He tweeted in June, “If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!”
A lot of Republican moderates, though, are against this idea, including Senator Shelley Moore Capito. These Republicans don’t like the idea of creating so much uncertainty by repealing Obamacare without a clear replacement ready to go.
“I’ve seen how we’ve struggled with this,” Senator Capito recently said, according to Talking Points Memo. “I have seen how the different ideas and panic that sets through with people when they don’t know what they’re looking at, when they don’t know what they’re facing.”
There are 52 Republicans in the Senate, and 50 votes are required to pass this Obamacare repeal, so today’s proposal is not expected to be successful. If it fails, the Senate will continue voting on other Obamacare repeal amendments.
One alternate option is being referred to as “skinny repeal,” which would eliminate the individual and employer mandate, and it would also eliminate Obamacare’s tax on medical devices.