Senate Republicans on Thursday led a successful vote to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding in a legislative package aimed at repealing significant parts of the Affordable Care Act.
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The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved a bill repealing the bulk of the Affordable Care Act in a vote of 52 to 47 that largely went along party lines.
Republicans said an Obama veto – which the White House has promised – will underscore that a GOP triumph in next year’s presidential and congressional elections would mean repeal of a statute they blame for surging medical costs and insurers abandoning some markets.
Two moderate Republican senators, Mark Kirk of IL and Susan Collins of ME, joined 44 Democrats and one independent in opposing the measure.
The measure guts Obamacare by repealing authority for the federal government to run healthcare exchanges and scrapping subsidies to help people afford plans bought through those exchanges, according to The Hill.
Planned Parenthood has been under fire since July when a conservative anti-abortion group released videos that allegedly show medical workers affiliated with the pro-choice org discussing the sale of aborted fetal tissue.
The Senate-revised repeal would eliminate numerous ACA’s tax increases, which the House bill left intact.
Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, also praised the Senate’s approval of the legislation that would transfer taxpayer Medicaid money from Planned Parenthood to health care clinics that do not perform abortions.
As with Obamacare, Senate Democrats have blocked recent efforts to defund the organization so the reconciliation bill became the GOP’s best option to move the measure. But because the Senate made changes to it in order to abide by budgetary rules, the House of Representatives should vote once more. “They opposed the philosophy of it and they knew we were going to have a mess on our hands”, Sessions said. If you’re a Republican, they’re the same thing.
A second amendment, sponsored by three Senate Republicans, would have removed the provision defunding Planned Parenthood from the bill to repeal ObamaCare. It also would end an expansion of the federal-state Medicaid health program for the poor, though Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican, has said the legislation would provide a two-year transition to enable people to find alternative coverage.
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Instead, she said that what the legislators did was give the people the “cold shoulder of indifference”. Obama’s law was enacted five years ago; Republicans haven’t produced a detailed proposal to replace it.
