As the Senate’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act fell apart last week, Rep. Martha McSally and about 40 House Republicans and Democrats were busy working on new healthcare legislation.
The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus unveiled this morning a set of fixes to Obamacare designed to stabilize health insurance markets across the country.
A key proposal to the legislation requires the federal government pay out cost-sharing subsidies — an estimated $7 billion — to insurance companies this year. The payments are a central part of the ACA designed to lower premiums for individual customers in the marketplace.
Other provisions in the legislation include raising the employer mandate from 50 employees to 500 and repealing the medical device tax.
"It doesn’t take a doctor to diagnose that the individual market across the country is not healthy and urgent action is needed to help our constituents," McSally said Monday morning.
The two-term Tucson Republican said she has been working on the legislation for the last several weeks, as a member of the Problem Solver Caucus.
McSally said the efforts of the caucus wasn’t trying to undermine what the Senate was doing but realized that there was an immediate need for some changes in the marketplace.
She said the healthcare marketplace is not working under the current law.
"2018 is coming fast, and we saw this as a strong step to break the fever," McSally said.
While some of the fixes were inside the the skinny repeal that failed in the Senate last week, McSally said there were some compromises on both sides.
"We had to swallow some requests from the other side," she acknowledged.
The retired Air Force colonel said she could not wait for a solution to come out of the Republican leadership or from the White House, saying she wasn't going to be a bystander as individuals, families and small businesses struggled under Obamacare.
