With a  majority in the House and Senate and a Republican President, we have the opportunity of a lifetime to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with a market-driven, affordable program that puts the power of health care related decisions back into the hands of the American people. Americans need to call their legislators and let them know where you stand. Did we elect these Republican lawmakers to give us a watered down version of Obamacare or did we elect them to repeal and replace it?  

House Republicans leaders on Monday embraced a legislative plan to replace the Affordable Care Act for the first time in the nearly seven years since Democrats enacted the transformative health-insurance law.

Now, they have to sell it.

That challenge ran into an immediate threat from key conservatives who criticized the new proposal for failing to fulfill the party’s iron-clad promise to rip out the signature policy of former President Barack Obama. “It’s Obamacare in a different format,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said in a phone interview. Jordan cited three provisions that conservatives have complained about for weeks leading up to the formal release of the House GOP plan on Monday evening: its extension of Obamacare Medicaid expansion for another four years; its failure to immediately repeal all of the law’s tax increases; and its call to provide refundable tax credits to help people buy insurance, which Jordan labeled “a new entitlement.”

Earlier on Monday, another member of the Freedom Caucus, Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, condemned the leadership bill in a two-word tweet: “Obamacare 2.0.” The full Freedom Caucus comprises about three dozen members of the 237 in the House Republican majority. If they voted as a bloc, they could sink the bill on their own. A spokeswoman for its chairman, Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, said members were still reviewing the legislation on Monday evening, and Jordan said the group planned to meet on Tuesday to discuss it.

The reaction from conservative advocacy groups was no more favorable to the Republican leadership. FreedomWorks labeled the plan’s requirement that people pay a 30 percent premium to insurers if they stop their coverage for more than two months “the Republican individual mandate.”

And on Tuesday morning, two more staunchly conservative activist organizations, Heritage Action and the Club for Growth, came out against the proposal. “Many Americans seeking health insurance on the individual market will notice no significant difference between the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) and the American Health Care Act,” the group’s president, Michael Needham said. “That is bad politics and, more importantly, bad policy. Rather than accept the flawed premises of Obamacare, congressional Republicans should fully repeal the failed law and begin a genuine effort to deliver on longstanding campaign promises that create a free market health-care system that empowers patients and doctors.” The Club for Growth pejoratively dubbed the new bill “RyanCare” and added a new threat, vowing to downgrade any Republican who votes for the bill in the group’s closely-watched annual congressional scorecard.- The Atlantic

The introduction of the GOP’s new healthcare bill has raised some definite ire among Republicans and Libertarians alike. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is one such politician who has now seen the bill and expressed his extreme dislike of it, calling the GOP plan “Obamacare Lite.”

According to The Hill, Paul is not letting Obamacare Lite happen without a fight, and he has allies. The libertarian leaning senator is teaming up with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to release their own bill to repeal Obamacare on Wednesday, and it’s highly similar to the one that Republicans voted for unanimously in 2015.

“We voted on this last year, and every Republican voted for it,” Paul said at a press conference alongside his House conservative colleagues. “That’s what we should do again.”

“You have to get rid of ObamaCare completely,” Jordan added.
Paul stated in an interview earlier today that this GOP bill “will not pass,” and that “conservatives aren’t gonna to take it.” However Paul and Jordan face an uphill struggle as GOP leadership, including that of President Donald Trump, seem to believe the bill to be a solid plan.

“We’re going to do something that’s great. And I am proud to support the replacement plan released by the House of Representatives,” Trump said of the bill. “It follows the guidelines I laid out in my congressional address. This will be a plan where you can choose your doctor and this will be a plan where you can choose your plan. And you know what the plan is. This is the plan.” – The Blaze