Rep. Mark Sanford: Emerging plan to unshackle states on health care ‘makes sense’

Rep. Mark Sanford said an emerging House proposal on health care could help deliver the breakthrough that President Trump and GOP leaders desperately need to move forward with their repeal-and-replace-Obamacare strategy.

The proposal, he said, would let states like Vermont pursue a bigger government role in health care and let his own state execute a more “market-based” system.

“I think it’s something that makes sense,” Mr. Sanford, South Carolina Republican and a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The plan negotiated by Rep. Tom MacArthur, New Jersey Republican who chairs the centrist Tuesday Group, would shift to the states the burden of deciding what services insurers must cover, and would let insurers charge healthy customers less, so long as states set up risk pools to subsidize sicker people priced out of the market.

No state could waive the part of Obamacare requiring insurers to cover people with preexisting medical conditions, however, preserving the most popular part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

It’s unclear whether the proposal can win over enough holdouts to pass. Republicans’ first go-around last month ended in a mess after leaders were unable to muster the votes, and had to yank the bill.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus who balked at the initial plan will likely warm to the waiver idea.

Yet centrists might not want to let states untether themselves from the part of Obamacare that bars insurers from charging sick people more than healthy ones, since they’d promised to preserve the provision.

Mr. Trump is pushing for a win on health care in the coming days, even as GOP leaders pump the brakes and focus on avoiding a government shutdown this week. The president said the health bill is getting “better and better” each day.

“The quote, ’better,’ that he’s talking about are these very negotiations,” Mr. Sanford said of the state waiver plan.