Conservatives Find Little to Love in American Health Care Act

House Republicans unveiled their repeal and replace plan for Obamacare which they have called the American Health Care Act but conservatives are have found the plan lacking referring to it as “Obamacare 2.o” and “Obamacare light.”

Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus told CNN in an interview that the American Health Care Act (AHCA) doesn’t do enough, or do it quick enough.

“I don’t see any significant changes here,” Jordan said in an interview. “We put on President Obama’s desk a bill that got rid of all the taxes and … a Republican Congress is going to put on a Republican president’s desk a bill that keeps taxes in place?”

AHCA doesn’t repeal most of the taxes until 2018 and allows Medicaid expansion to continue until 2020 – an obviously political timeline leaving many to doubt that the expansion will ever be reigned in.

Rep. Jordan said that three major plans have been put forward by republicans but that the one most like Obamacare is the one being advanced.

“There’s the Cassidy-Collins ‘like Obamacare, you get to keep Obamacare.’ There’s this one, which I think in many ways is Obamacare by just a different format, and then there’s our plan, which I think is the one that’s entirely consistent with what the voters expected and what we told them we were going to do.”

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday that the Obamacare “Cadillac tax” is still in there – “it just comes back in eight years.”

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) said in the same interview that the House GOP plan “creates a new entitlement,” referring to the tax credit that will replace the Obamacare subsidy with a taxpayer funded entitlement in a different form. “We actually send people checks!” Gohmert exclaimed.

One of the proposed changes that Rep. Meadows would like to see would be to allow the subsidies to be used to fund a Health Savings Account, which Gohmert and Meadows agreed were not in the current bill.

Mark up on the American Health Care Act is scheduled to start Wednesday and a flurry of proposed amendments are expected.