Rand Paul

            Senator Rand Paul is my VIP for this week, and he may just be the most important member of the U.S. Senate. It seems that Paul is the only person in Congress that remembers their promises. He recently posted an article outlining his reasons for not voting for the Senate healthcare bill. 

I miss the old days, when Republicans stood for repealing Obamacare. Republicans across the country and every member of my caucus campaigned on repeal – often declaring they would tear out Obamacare “root and branch”! …

The Senate Obamacare bill does not repeal Obamacare. I want to repeat that so everyone realizes why I’ll vote “no” as it stands now.

            Paul states clearly that he will not vote for the Senate bill as it is written because it does not repeal Obamacare. He calls the bill “Obamacare-lite” and says it does nothing to improve health care.

The Senate Obamacare bill does not repeal Obamacare. Not even close.

In fact, the Senate GOP bill codifies and likely expands many aspects of Obamacare.

The Senate Obamacare-lite bill codifies a federal entitlement to insurance. With the Senate GOP bill, Republicans, for the first time, will signal that they favor a key aspect of Obamacare – federal taxpayer funding of private insurance purchases.

The bill will transfer billions of dollars to people who will then transfer billions of dollars to insurance companies….

The Senate Obamacare-lite bill does what the Democrats forgot to do – appropriate billions for Obamacare’s cost-sharing reductions, aka subsidies. Really? Republicans are going to fund Obamacare subsidies that the Democrats forgot to fund?

Doesn’t sound much like repeal to me. One might even argue it’s worse than Obamacare-lite because it actually creates a giant superfund to bail out the insurance companies – something even the Democrats feared to do.

            According to Paul, the Republicans are trying to make Obamacare even worse, rather than repeal it completely and then replace it with something better. The insurance companies surely must be exerting some pressure on Congress to get this type of treatment! It is definitely not the program that Americans are demanding.

I was first elected in the heady days of the Tea Party Tidal Wave, when tens of thousands of citizens gathered on the central city lawn to protest Big Government, Big Debt, and a government takeover of health care.

This citizenry won in four elections. Each time, the GOP establishment told conservatives, “We can’t repeal Obamacare until we have all three branches of

government.” Finally, in 2016, that came to pass. Republicans now control all three branches of government.

And . . . the best that is offered is Obamacare-lite: keeping the Obamacare subsidies, keeping some of the Obamacare taxes, creating a giant insurance bailout superfund, and keeping most of the Obamacare regulations.

            Senator Paul may be joined by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) in opposing the bill. So far, Lee has not committed himself one way or the other. Hopefully, he will stand with Paul and save Americans from Obamacare-lite. Maybe, just maybe, both of them will remember their campaign promises to repeal Obamacare.