Paul's position is perplexing for a couple of reasons:
- He voted for a lesser Obamacare repeal bill in July.
2.
The bill he opposes is one of Republicans' likeliest chances to
repeal most of Obamacare in the near future.
He is the only one of 52 GOP senators who is willing to vote against
a last-chance effort to repeal Obamacare because it doesn't
go far enough.
Some of the other senators leaning against the bill have concerns about the rushed process, or how the bill could leave millions uninsured, or how their governors feel about it. This bill goes too far in undoing government's role in health care, they argue.
Paul, almost uniquely, sees this differently. If states want to keep all of Obamacare in place, they can, he points out. (Although there will be less money to pay for it.) For the states that want to repeal Obamacare, Paul doesn't trust the government to give them waivers to do it. (Despite the fact the bill says the Health and Human Services secretary has to.)
“I’ve already spent the better part of the year arguing with an army of bureaucrats and lawyers in the administration trying to get them to do something President Trump and I AGREE should be done — loosening up the rules on joining group plans,” Paul wrote
He was on CNN last week where he said:
"This isn't a repeal. This is keeping Obamacare and redistributing the proceeds.," said Paul. "So, this is not a repeal bill, this is sort of, 'Hey, we'll take Obamacare, replace it with Obamacare, but we're going to let the states have a little more power in how we spend it.'"
Paul said he would support a partial repeal bill -- as he did with the "skinny bill" that was voted on earlier this summer and failed to pass -- but argued that the Graham-Cassidy bill is not that.
"The Graham-Cassidy bill basically immortalizes Obamacare, keeps Obamacare spending, keeps the taxes and all it does is reshuffle the proceeds from
Democratic states,"
He basically doesn't think this bill will really repeal ALL of Obamacare.
Their sales pitch is, “If you like your ObamaCare, you can keep it.” That’s nice, but I don’t like it, I don’t want to keep it, and I don’t want to keep paying for it.