House passes bill to dismantle key parts of Obamacare

WASHINGTON — The House on Friday passed a budget bill that would dismantle key parts of Obamacare and strip federal funds from Planned Parenthood for a year.

House members voted 240-189 to pass the bill, which would repeal the Affordable Care Act's requirement for all Americans to obtain health insurance and for employers to offer it to their workers. It also would end a tax on medical devices.

The budget reconciliation bill faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, even though it requires only a simple majority of 51 senators to pass it instead of the super-majority of 60 senators usually needed to approve major legislation.

Three conservative Republicans — Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida — said they will oppose it because it does not repeal Obamacare outright.

"This simply isn’t good enough," the three senators said in a joint press release Thursday. "Each of us campaigned on a promise to fully repeal Obamacare...With millions of Americans now getting health premium increase notices in the mail, we owe our constituents nothing less.”

At the same time, three moderate Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Mark Kirk of Illinois and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — also may oppose the bill because it would defund Planned Parenthood.

There are 54 Republicans in the Senate, meaning that GOP leaders can only lose three of their senators if they hope to pass the bill. The 44 Democrats and two independents in the Senate are all expected to vote against the legislation.

Even if the Senate approves the bill, President Obama has vowed to veto it.

"This is a bill that . . . has no chance of becoming law," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

Republicans try new way to defund Planned Parenthood, avoiding shutdown

Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., said the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation estimate the bill would lower the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years by increasing economic growth.

"Obamacare puts Washington in charge," Price said. "We want to put the American people in charge of their own health care decisions."

Van Hollen said the bill would strip millions of Americans of medical insurance.

"The legislation, plain and simple, takes away affordable health care to 15 million Americans, including 3 million children," he said, citing CBO estimates. "That is nothing to be proud of."

The bill would also suspend federal funds for Planned Parenthood. Republicans have been trying to defund Planned Parenthood for months in the wake of controversial videos of employees of the nation's largest abortion provider discussing payments for tissue and organs from aborted fetuses. Planned Parenthood vehemently denies the allegation that it sells the tissue for profit, saying that undercover videos taken by anti-abortion activists were heavily edited and misleading. The group recently announced that it will stop accepting payments to cover the costs of procuring fetal tissue for medical researchers.

Three House committees, including a new select panel, are investigating the allegations against Planned Parenthood. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, announced Friday that he was appointing Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., to serve as chairman of the select panel. The Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee are continuing their own investigations.

Planned Parenthood receives more than $500 million a year from the federal government to provide medical checkups, cancer screenings, and birth control services. It is barred by federal law from using that money to pay for abortions.