CT Delegation: Obamacare Replacement Will Be Back

April 13--A House bill that would have replaced Obamacare bitterly divided the Republican caucus and inspired thousands of angry calls from constituents. But Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told a health care industry audience Wednesday that repeal-and-replace isn't dead yet.

"It remains a political imperative," he said, because core Republican voters hate the law. Rep. John Larson, D-1st District, said the law's passage led to a Republican majority in the House in 2010, because Republican voters were so mobilized against it.

A number of Republican members of Congress have said Republicans and Democrats should work together on an Obamacare replacement, and Murphy said they're open, as long as the goal is to maintain broader Medicaid coverage and retain subsidized individual plans. But he said such a negotiation is very unlikely.

"What is more plausible is they will try to ram something through the House that then hits a big wall in the Senate," he said.

Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-5th District, encouraged attendees at Metro Hartford Alliance's Connecticut Health Council meeting to lobby the White House. "Make clear the cost of chaos. Make clear what's working, and what's not."

Larson agreed. "Don't underestimate the role and the value of town hall meetings, people calling in." He recounted with some glee that South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson, who once shouted "You lie!" to President Obama during a State of the Union address, was greeted with the same chant by people attending his town hall meeting Monday.

The delegation acknowledged that much is wrong with today's health care system, including Obamacare, and Larson said that President Donald Trump tapped into resentment about excessive costs, including for prescription drugs.

Esty pointed to pharmaceutical companies' gaming the FDA approval system by repurposing mass market drugs as orphan drugs for new indications. And, she said, she thinks that allowing direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs was a mistake. Murmurs of approval went up around the room.

One of the things that angers voters about health care is the rising deductibles in employer-sponsored plans. Employers offer those plans to keep premiums in check.

Ted Doolittle, a former attorney for UnitedHealthcare and now Connecticut's patient advocate, said these kinds of plans are touted as a solution to the health sector's problems with fast rising costs, because consumers will shop around for medical tests or services.

Given both the lack of transparency on cost and the fact that consumers are the least powerful players in the economic system, Doolittle said high-deductible plans are "a little bit of a fraud on the consumer."

Mark Schaefer, who led the initial Medicaid expansion in Connecticut and still works in health care reform for the state, said all high-deductible plans do is discourage people from getting health care they should be getting.

In a later panel, UnitedHealthcare CEO of National Accounts Elizabeth Winsor defended the plans as "allowing consumers to make better choices."

CareCentrix CEO John Driscoll, speaking on the same panel of payers and providers, scoffed, saying bluntly that health care is unaffordable for regular working people. However, he did say a positive consequence of high-deductible plans is that it's bringing political pressure to reform the system.

"This is an urgent issue," he said. "It's about people starting to see the actual cost, the weird, unpredictable costs that we are all on the hook for. Costs that are rising way too fast."

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