Wisconsin's Ron Johnson joins effort to fix House health care bill

WASHINGTON - As Senate Republicans struggle in the many weeks ahead to agree on a health care bill, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson says he intends to be in the thick of that debate.

On his own initiative, he has joined a loosely defined health care “working group” of GOP senators that met for the first time Tuesday.

“It’s going to be very difficult” to get a Republican consensus on health care in Congress, but there are 52 GOP senators who “really want to get to yes,” Johnson said in an interview Thursday.

Johnson, who was re-elected last fall, has been a fierce critic of Obamacare over the years.

But he has also criticized the House GOP bill to replace Obamacare, a piece of legislation Senate Republicans are unlikely to approve without significant changes. In an interview with the Journal Sentinel in March, the Wisconsin Republican voiced skepticism that his party would enact a new health care law this year.

Johnson offered no predictions Thursday. He said he supports some aspects of the House bill but not others.

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Johnson is critical of the how the House handled tax credits and subsidies for people buying insurance on the individual market. The House bill provides much less funding overall than Obamacare does for those subsidies but increases the number of people eligible for aid to include Americans who are higher up the income scale.

The result, said Johnson, is substantially less help for lower-income enrollees but an “expanded entitlement” that offers aid to some higher-income Americans who don’t currently qualify for assistance under the Affordable Care Act.

“I don’t think that is going to be sustainable or work all that well,” said Johnson. “I would say if you’re going to reduce the subsidies, at least keep it confined to that same population.”

Johnson said he supported many of the dramatic Medicaid changes in the House GOP plan, in which the program would cease to be an open-ended entitlement and states either would get a fixed amount of money per Medicaid beneficiary or get a fixed block grant for their overall Medicaid spending.

Johnson said the “most positive aspect” of the House bill was “devolving” Medicaid to the states and curbing Medicaid spending, which he said would put the program “on a more sustainable fiscal path.” Democrats are staunchly opposed to those changes, and some moderate Republicans have voiced concerns about them, as well. The Medicaid cuts in the bill would result in several million fewer people with health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Johnson also said he supports another controversial feature of the House bill — allowing states to seek waivers and “opt out” of key Obamacare rules on insurance companies, such as the prohibition on charging people who buy their own policies a higher price when they have costly “pre-existing” health conditions. Under the House bill, those states that opt out would have to set up “high-risk” insurance polls pools for those enrollees, and would get some federal funding to do so.

“I’m all for state control,’’ said Johnson. But the Senate Republican said whatever bill Congress passes should make sure that states that are getting federal money for high-risk pools are setting them up in a way that uses “best practices” and brings premiums down for most people buying insurance policies on the individual market.

“I want to be convinced that (federal) money is going to be used to actually bring down premiums,” said Johnson.

Johnson said he plans to be a "full-time member" of the Senate’s GOP health care working group. That has been described in media reports as a set group who will meet regularly to help hammer out a bill. Johnson was not listed as a member in most early news accounts.

But it’s unclear at the moment how fixed and formal the membership of the Republican working group will turn out to be. Johnson said, "I went up to the (Senate) Leader (Mitch McConnell) as soon as I found out this group was forming. ... He knows this is why I ran. I certainly wanted to be involved in this process."