Rand Paul: Dropping insurance bailout from health care bill will improve chances of passage

Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that if the insurance bailout were removed from the Republican health care replacement he might be able to support it.

“There is some good in the bill, but there’s an enormous insurance bailout fund. I have told them that if they take that insurance bailout money and put that on a separate bill that would likely pass,” Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, said on Fox News.

“They can probably get what they want, and conservatives wouldn’t be forced to vote for something that conservatives think government should fundamentally not be involved with,” he said.

Mr. Paul has been vocal in his opposition of the replacement plan for Obamacare saying that the Republican bill doesn’t do enough to lower premiums or remove the mandates. He has advocated voting on a simple repeal vote and continuing to work on a replacement plan.

“At this point it is a bit confusing. I announced that I would vote for the bill, that it would be the clean 2015 bill,” he said. “Yesterday, the Senate leadership equivocated.”

But Mr. Paul said the worst thing Republicans can do at this point is pass something that doesn’t work.

“I think all of these plans allow the death spiral to continue. In the Republican plan, they subsidize the death spiral. In the president’s plan, they force people to buy insurance. Neither are going to work,” he said. “The only thing that would really work is get rid of the federal regulations, all of them, on insurance and let states handle this. Send it back to the people.”