Saying that he has "concerns about the healthcare bill in its current form along with the amendment that's been offered," Republican Rep. Charlie Dent told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday that "we should work together in a bipartisan way to try to do a durable, sustainable reform."
"We need to do healthcare from the center out and I suspect we should work on fixing the individual insurance market, because I know Democrats know that that's broken under Obamacare and we should also be working to repeal some of the taxes in the healthcare law … Right now, I believe we as Republicans might make the same mistakes Democrats did where Democrats muscled Obamacare through on a partisan basis in 2010. We shouldn't make that same mistake in 2017," he said.
Dent, who is co-chairman of the moderate Tuesday Group in the House, stressed that the only way to move forward on a wide range of issues is for there to be a bipartisan coalition.
The Pennsylvania congressman said his main concern with the current proposal is "The Medicaid provisions in the bill do not provide a soft enough landing. We should be consulting with Republican governors … who gave us a very thoughtful proposal to make sure states have the flexibility and the resources needed to care for people. More importantly, there would not be a cost shift if we adopt their proposal … The other issue, too, is once people are moved off of Medicaid, they'll be forced into the exchanges. Under the current bill, the maximum amount of a tax credit is about $4,000, so I suspect a lot of people won't be able to afford insurance on the exchanges so they'll go bare or naked and they'll be uninsured."
Dent said that one of his main problems with Trump's first 100 days in office was "Too many distractions that were frankly unnecessary and self-inflicted. I'm hoping going forward, we'll see a little bit less tweeting, and a little bit more substantive dialogue on these big issues."
Asked about his advice for the president, Dent said "I would be moving forward on infrastructure right now. That's an issue that appeals not only to Republicans, but certainly to a lot of Democrats. I always felt from a strategic standpoint, I would have started off with infrastructure to try to attempt to get some Democrats onboard. It would be very hard for Democrats to vote against that kind of funding."
The congressman also added that "One of the challenges we had over the first few months is too much of the dialogue on healthcare has been driven by artificial time lines, arbitrary deadlines, all to improve the baseline for tax reform … I think we can have a productive dialogue on tax reform as well as infrastructure and marry the two issues together at some point."
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