Republican contenders for Louisiana’s U.S. Senate seat pushed for repeal of President Barack Obama’s federal health care overhaul today, while their Democratic opponents said they want tweaks instead. But both sets of candidates were short on specifics about the health care changes they’d seek to improve coverage, The Associated Press reports.
Among Republicans, U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany said people need a wider array of insurance choices and more focus on the “doctor-patient relationship.” He called the current health law championed by Obama “deeply flawed,” noting he has repeatedly voted to scrap the provisions.
U.S. Rep. John Fleming talked of needing a “market-based approach” to replace the law and blamed the law for “devastating jobs” across the country. He said businesses have been cutting full-time workers to part-time status to avoid the insurance mandate.
Treasurer John Kennedy said the country needs more choice, more competition, more price transparency and less fraud, saying he’d push to repeal a ban on buying insurance across state lines.
Joseph Cao, a Republican former congressman, said he’d support repeal, citing concerns about small business regulations, electronic reporting requirements and concerns that federal money could later pay for abortion services. But he also questioned if the law would ever be jettisoned.
“If we cannot repeal it, we should fix it,” he said in a health care forum sponsored by the Louisiana Association of Health Plans.
Among Democratic candidates, Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, lawyer Caroline Fayard and oil and gas businessman Josh Pellerin said they wanted adjustments, not repeal.
Campbell said he’d seek improvements for small business regulations. Pellerin suggested the law could use a name change and said while it’s not “perfect, I certainly think it has its benefits,” like allowing children to stay on their parents’ health insurance until the age of 26 and prohibiting coverage refusal based on pre-existing conditions.
Fayard said the health insurance mandate and open enrollment standards need to be changed. She said while the law was pitched as an effort to drive down costs and increase competition for consumers, that hasn’t happened. But she said Congress should be able to work with the health industry to make improvements, rather than starting from scratch.
“The Affordable Care Act has been up to the Supreme Court twice, a very conservative court that ruled on it. I think anyone that tells you it’s going away anytime soon is just selling a bill of goods,” Fayard said.
