This Senator Thinks Bipartisan Changes Can ‘Fix’ Obamacare

“Step-by-step” changes to Obamacare are the way to improve the health care system, the chairman of the Senate’s committee on health issues says.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., predicts that bipartisan changes to President Barack Obama’s signature health care law will occur over the span of a few years.

“I think over the next four or five years it’ll be changed step by step toward a health care system with more freedom for people to find policies, more choices and hopefully lower prices,” Alexander was quoted as saying by Roll Call.  “[W]e need to keep in mind health care costs as we try to fix Obamacare.”

Such an Obamacare “fix” cannot be done in a “partisan way,” he said in the interview with C-SPAN.

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As chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Alexander said, one of his top priorities was reforming the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Alexander compared the model for the No Child Left Behind “fix” to bipartisan efforts needed to change Obamacare, reported Roll Call.

A bipartisan No Child Left Behind rewrite—the Every Student Succeeds Act—was signed into law by Obama earlier this month. Conservatives said the compromises spearheaded by Alexander and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., did not go far enough to get Washington out of state and local education decisions.

But Obama called it a “Christmas miracle” and “a true bipartisan effort, a reminder of what can be done when people enter into these issues in a spirit of listening and compromise.”

“So I was telling Lamar we should do this more often,” Obama said, referring to Alexander.

Health insurance premiums are on the rise, according to recent reports, and insurance options could be limited as the workforce shrinks because of regulations under Obamacare.

Many health insurance co-ops created under Obamacare have failed, forcing consumers to find new health care coverage.

Conservatives—especially in the House—have worked to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a consumer-focused system, but their efforts got nowhere in the Senate until this month.

“Republicans have a plan to create a bridge away from Obamacare,” Alexander wrote in a Washington Post column early this year co-authored by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and John Barrasso, R-Wyo.