The Republican congressman who represents Northern Nevada says Obamacare is here to stay even though his party has worked for almost a decade to overturn it.
Rep. Mark Amodei said last month’s failure in the Senate of the GOP’s latest Affordable Care Act “repeal and replace” effort shows the need for more bipartisanship.
“The Affordable Care Act will never be repealed,” he said. “It needs to be fixed.”
Amodei lamented what he called the “think tank approach,” where one party tries to pass a complex piece of legislation without input from the opposition.
“So you have this huge issue scrum in the media where you decide the side that wins is the one with the best messaging,” he said. “The side that wins should be the side with the best solutions to the issues.”
The four-term congressman said traditional legislative process would help forge bipartisan solutions to challenges such as dealing with pre-existing conditions and covering the indigent.
“They’ll end up working together if you have a hearing,” he said. “The darnedest thing happens in a hearing … you hear differing views, from differing perspectives; it makes you think. That is the foundation of the legislative experience.”
Whichever way healthcare is addressed, Amodei said the government can't afford to keep subsidizing national health insurers. He said the insurance companies profits and stock prices are up dramatically over the past few years, but they're still being subsidized by the government.
"The dollars and cents of how things are funded to pay these companies to subsidize them writing these things federally is something that is quite simply unsustainable," he said.
He said just setting healthcare aside and not addressing the problems is not an option.
(Editor's note: We spoke to Rep. Amodei before President Donald Trump signed an executive order that made changes that impacted healthcare insurance)
Mark Amodei, congressman representing Northern Nevada