Moran won’t support GOP health care bill, sinking legislation’s chances for now

Sen. Jerry Moran, who years ago was the first member of Congress to formally seek repeal of the Affordable Care Act, on Monday became a major player in keeping the 7-year-old law alive, as least for now, as he said he’d oppose the Senate Republican effort to overhaul the system.

He was joined by Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, pushing the number of GOP opponents to four. Since Republicans control 52 of the Senate’s 100 seats, the current version of the GOP plan is dead.

“We should not put our stamp of approval on bad policy,” Moran said in a statement.

The senator, re-elected overwhelmingly to a second Senate term last year, has long been regarded as a Republican loyalist. And he reiterated Monday that his goal for the Affordable Care Act “remains what it had been for a long time: To repeal and replace it.”

But Moran has been troubled by how fellow Republicans have gone about doing that. On Monday, he criticized the “closed door process” that produced the version of the overhaul, and found that the latest bill, unveiled last week, “fails to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address health care’s rising costs.”

Moran was one of about 10 Republican senators who had raised objections to an earlier version of the bill released last month. Two had already said they were opposed to the latest version, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Last month, Moran’s concerns included worry about the bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid, which he said could devastate rural hospitals in his home state of Kansas. He held a series of packed town halls on the subject in his state to solicit feedback from constituents.

Moran warned Monday that if Republicans don’t come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, supporters of a government-run health care system will triumph, costing taxpayers untold amounts of money. But it’s highly unlikely a “single payer” system would ever win congressional approval. While it has a strong following among some Democrats, others are wary.

Moran called for Congress to start over with a more bipartisan approach, a strategy that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, had floated recently.

Moran wants an “open legislative process to develop innovative solutions that provide greater personal choice, protections for pre-existing conditions, increased access and lower overall costs for Kansas.”

David Jordan, director of the Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, which opposes the bill, praised Moran.

“We’re pleased the senator has chosen to protect the interest of Kansans versus making decisions for political reasons,” Jordan said.

Among the objections Moran had raised about an earlier version of the bill were that it failed to address the systemic issues that drive up health care costs, it did not provide enough premium and deductible relief, and Kansans are more likely to lose access to health care.

Moran also said he would need statutory language or a program in the bill confirming rural hospitals would be better off, not worse.

“For the same reasons I could not support the previous version of this bill,” Moran said Monday, “I cannot support this one.”

The news of Moran and Lee’s opposition broke the same night that President Donald Trump met with a group of other Republican lawmakers — including Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt — for dinner at the White House to discuss the health care bill.

This story was originally published July 17, 2017 at 9:09 PM with the headline "Moran won’t support GOP health care bill, sinking legislation’s chances for now."