hopper for the last six years, back during the obamacare debate, before democrats decided to do this on purely a partisan vote without any republican support, there have been a lot of very good ideas that would accomplish what i said earlier. which is to maximize the choices that you and your family get to make. jenna: can you give us one of them? well, for example, by eliminating some of the mandates which make health insurance so expensive. in other words, why should you buy insurance if you are a man for maternity coverage? it makes no sense, but yet in this mandated list of coverage, it basically makes health insurance more expensive. many people would like to be able to manage their health care costs with a catastrophic emergency policy and then have an individual savings account that they would use to pay their periodic doctor visits. so you can t do that now because
our repealing and replacing and transitioning, the legislation will occur this year. what date all of this gets phased in on is something we do not know because we are waiting for the trump administration. the question there is, how long will it take for markets to put in place and markets to adjust? that question we don t know the answer to come up with a legislating on obamacare will happen this year. jenna: joining me now is the senate majority whip, number two, if you will, republican and the senate, happy new year to you, senator. thank you, jenna. jenna: it might be nice to ease back into work with nothing going on after a long holiday. [laughs] that is a little bit of an understatement. let s talk a little bit about health care, i understand that you just left an informal discussion, discussions are ongoing about this issue, and i m wondering what you can tell our viewers about where you stand as far as a solution for replacing obamacare. a few important points, jenna, o
employer coverage, but many people, about 11 million, are in the individual market where they have to buy it on their own. obamacare makes it too expensive and many people choose to not buy insurance, knowing that under obamacare you can buy it once you get sick, which distorts the markets and makes insurance for everybody much more expensive. jenna: some republicans, and democrats will say this, but some are publicans are also concerns about the cost, and wondering what you do with the individual mandate because of the costs, because we are told that everybody has to be in the pool so we keep costs down. what many may not realize is that when democrats say 20 million americans are getting insurance because of obamacare, half of those americans are getting it through medicaid. and that is really causing a lot of stress on the states. so how do you get the math right in all of this? well right now, even under obamacare, there are about 30 million people that don t have health covera
of obamacare, and so we believe in maximizing the individual choice, and the process of making it more affordable. jenna: the individual mandate itself at the heart of this bill is where a lot of the debate over whether or not obamacare should exist took place. we saw go to the supreme court, the supreme court ruled that yes, consumers in america can be taxed at what some called a punishment for not purchasing health care. in the solutions that you are seeing right now, do you keep the individual mandate, do republicans vote to keep the individual mandate for whatever replace that they are putting forward? the individual mandate was created to force people in and to penalize them for not buying insurance at the federal government said they had to buy. what we think would be better would be to repeal the individual mandate and to make health care more affordable. everybody understands that health coverage is important. we have a number of programs whether it s medicaid, medicare, ve
high that they effectively don t have the benefit of the insurance that they are mandated by as a result of federal law. and so we have said the second point is that we believe that obamacare should be repealed and replaced with health care choices that will maximize what you get to choose for yourself and your family at a price you can afford. and when the process of doing that now. i think what is confused that people is the fact that it s been six years in the making to this point, and it s going to take is a little while to make the transition, but the last point i would make is that we re not going to let anybody fall through the cracks. some of the propaganda coming out of our friends across the aisle is somehow once obamacare is repealed that there won t be any insurance. that is not true. there is going to be an orderly, careful, deliberate transition to make sure that nobody gets hurt in the process. jenna: why, after six years, do you not have more specific answers about ho