Not a single health care amendment will get 50 votes in Senate: Former Eli Lilly USA president
Republicans on Capitol Hill are continuing with their fight to repeal and replace ObamaCare, but former Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) USA President Alex Azar holds a grim outlook for the future of health care reform, telling the FOX Business Network’s Stuart Varney, “Well, maybe there’ll be an amendment that’s in favor of apple pie and motherhood and baseball and that might pass, but I have trouble seeing that anything is going to get 50 votes in the U.S. Senate right now.”
According to Azar, Medicaid is a key issue.
“It is very hard to see, given what we’ve seen in the Senate that anything that comes out of a possible House and Senate conference committee will deal at all with Medicaid…The liberal Republicans seem to be so entrenched in the Medicaid expansion, very hard to see that.”
But when Varney questioned what the alternative is, asking Azar,“Can you just walk away entirely as ObamaCare collapses?” Azar predicted, “I think at the end of the day this is a hot potato that lands back in [Health & Human Services] Secretary Price’s lap for him to use as many authorities as he has to grant flexibility and try to dig us out of the ObamaCare mess as much as he can.”