“Some will say, ‘Well, all you gotta do is just file a little bill to let the federal exchanges handle matters, too.’ That flies in the face of what many, many believe is an unconstitutional approach to health care. It could be simply fixed, except it doesn’t fix the bill as a whole,” Hatch said Thursday.
Hatch said he had discussed the issue that morning with Sen. Lamar Alexander, the incoming chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Hatch and Alexander’s committees would have the primary responsibility for writing a potential fix.
A more palatable approach could be to restore at least some of the law’s subsidies in exchange for other changes. “Dealing with the subsidy issue may give us a chance to deal with a lot of other things…. You might want to fix that, but at the same time you fix that, you might want to do a lot of other things that need to be done to Obamacare,” Sen. Chuck Grassley said.
The scope of those changes could vary wildly, from simple horse-trading on provisions like the medical-device tax and employer mandate to a more aggressive restructuring of the law’s benefit structure.
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