McCarthy Lays Out Need for Health Care Reform

WASHINGTON, DC – Just hours before the House of Representatives approved legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) appeared before a breakfast meeting of The Ripon Society to express optimism about the bill’s passage and talk about the need for reform.

“We’ve got a bill up on the floor today,” the California lawmaker stated.  “It will get up and out.  If you put politics aside and just think about where the ACA is, with the pullout [of Medica] in Iowa yesterday, 94 out of 99 counties in the state will not have health care. Aetna is pulling out of Virginia. Sixteen counties in Tennessee next year won’t have health care … One third of our entire nation now has only one option.”

Yesterday’s passage of the reform bill will help address these and other problems facing America’s health care system, McCarthy said.  It will also, he added, help pave the way for other needed reforms that will strengthen America’s economy as a whole.  These reforms include rewriting the U.S. tax code and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.  The reforms also include rolling back federal rules and red tape – something, he noted, that Congress has already started to do through the Congressional Review Act.

“Prior to this administration,” McCarthy stated, “only one bill under the Congressional Review Act has ever been signed into law. We’ve passed 15 in the House, and 13 have been signed into law. You might not like all of them, but it definitely sets a different tone.”

McCarthy said the House will continue on this same track when it returns to Washington the week after next and takes up a bill by U.S. Rep. Will Hurd (TX- 23) to modernize the government.

“We spend $80 billion a year on technology, and 80 percent of that goes to legacy,” he stated. “These are programs that are long gone — Fortran, things I learned in college. Nobody in the private sector would settle for this. And the idea that we can start changing things and making things more effective and more accountable — I think you’ll see a transformation.”

After his remarks, McCarthy took a number of questions, including one about the ability of Congress and the President to come together on issues such as immigration and do something that has been a rarity of late in Washington, DC – compromise.

“He realizes we live in a country where you don’t get 100 percent of what you want,” the Majority Leader said of the President.  “You set a course and continue forward … There’s going to be compromise.  But this President has changed the course.  Think about the last eight years.  I give him a great deal of credit — to be able to have this vote on the floor.

“I was just talking to our Vice President, Mike Pence, and I was telling him I have never seen a President and Vice President engage so much and make so many calls and so many meetings. I mean, yesterday I walked into the Vice President’s office, and the President was calling me. He’s telling me the names that he thinks I’m best at getting.  He’s engaged and he’s talking about the policies. He said, ‘Look, I just had Upton and Walden and Billy Long in here.  We’re working this out. We’re making sure that pre-existing conditions are protected all the way through.  I like this amendment. Can you call so-and-so?’ I mean, this is a man who is engaged all the way through.”

To view the remarks of Majority Leader McCarthy before The Ripon Society’s breakfast discussion yesterday morning, please click on the link below:

The Ripon Society is a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 – Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.