Young and Murkowski skeptical of new House efforts to repeal, replace Affordable Care Act

WASHINGTON — Alaska Rep. Don Young and Sen. Lisa Murkowski aren't done with deal-making in Republicans' quest to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but they aren't swayed much by recent White House efforts.

In recent days, the White House has made overtures to House Republicans, including the conservative Freedom Caucus, to revive the stalled repeal-and-replace effort.

Late-night talks stalled out Tuesday, and it appears unlikely that a House deal will materialize before Congress heads out for the two-week Easter recess.

Conservatives and moderates didn't quite agree on the offers coming from the White House, and no text of a bill was publicly available, for lawmakers or the public. While President Donald Trump and high-level staffers previously pinned the blame for the failed health care bill on the Freedom Caucus, they seemed ready to make a deal this week.

Mike Needham, CEO of the conservative activist group Heritage Action, on Wednesday blamed stalled progress on moderate Republicans. He said that some of them don't seem interested in actually repealing "Obamacare."

Needham said that proposals made by the White House offered a chance for states to opt out of Affordable Care Act requirements, like regulations that ensure people with pre-existing conditions can get health insurance.

In an interview Tuesday evening, Young was optimistic about future plans, but not recent negotiations and rumors.

There is "a desire to try to not undo what happened, but to try to solve this problem about do we repeal?" Young said. "And of course my argument is we repeal and replace, but don't replace it with something worse than Obamacare. And I still think we went too fast, we didn't take the time," he said about the previous effort to repeal the ACA, pulled from the House floor at the last minute.

[Don Young: Canceling the health care vote was a 'victory for Alaska']

Young would like to see a deal that forces a bipartisan compromise: a repeal of Obamacare that doesn't take effect until 2020. "That gives us three and a half years to write a bill correctly. That'd make everybody have to come to the table," he said.

"How it's going to turn out? I don't know," he said, noting that there was a broad range of ideas floating around the House and Senate, including tweaking subsidies and allowing states to get broad waivers from complying with the ACA.

"There's all kinds of things out there. And as long as they're talking, I'm happy. But I don't want them to do something that's not well thought out and does not take care of the patients. That's my big goal. If you listen to all this discussion, I don't hear much about the patients. It's about insurance. Insurers don't take care of patients," Young said.

Murkowski, asked last week about a resurgence of plans among House conservatives, criticized the way the House went about its first effort.

"My sense was that you didn't have anybody that was trying to build good policy. They were trying to find votes," Murkowski said. "That's not how you build good policy."

"So if they start from where they left off and just have been able to bring on a few more members because they have inserted initiatives that are sufficient to get a few more on, but they haven't built good policy, I think it's going to meet the same fate that the last effort did," she said.

Like Young, Murkowski is hoping that both chambers can move toward a bipartisan solution. "That's my hope. That's what we're working on" in the Senate, she said.

[Murkowski still doesn't like much about House health bill; Speaker Ryan begs for Young's vote]

Murkowski said she's working with a few different groups of senators — one of states that want to keep Medicaid expansion, another of rural states that share similar problems.

When the first House bill died, "I sat down with my team and said, 'This does not mean that we put our files away and that the work is over, because we still have a failed individual market in the state. We still have an unsustainable system. We still have rising health care costs. So we've got a problem to solve,' " Murkowski said.

[House bill must be made fair for Alaskans, congressional delegation says]