Congressman Pat Meehan: Health Care In A 'Much More Precarious State Now'
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Congressman Pat Meehan, who represents Pennsylvania's 7th District talked with Dom Giordano on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT about the difference between Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2015 and today, saying that the state of the health care system has changed, requiring Congress to come up with a much more refined and specific form of regulation.
"The changed circumstances of where we are right now, Obamacare has continued to fall apart even more, but it puts us now in a more precarious state than we were then. I believe that if we had been able to work with repeal at that point in time, the thing was in a situation in which you could be able to, perhaps, get to a point where you could re-position the delivery of quality health care, get rid of some of those onerous parts of Obamacare. We're in a much more precarious state now and, unfortunately, you've got to take into consideration what the implications of this would mean. Repeal, not just the idea that you would be leaving numbers of people in a very uncertain circumstance right now, but, more importantly, the policies are predicted not to go down, but to significantly go up in that case because of the uncertainty for the very people that we're trying to protect."
He also disagreed with Donald Trump's decision to ban transgender service personnel from the military, but thinks the Pentagon can determine for themselves what the requirements should be.
"I still believe that an individual who can meet the training and readiness requirements should be permitted to serve our nation, but when we have people who are not able to serve because they have flat feet, if a requirement to serve is that you need gender reassignment surgery, I think it's appropriate to be able to say that would not be something that the military should be required to accommodate in order to allow you to serve. This is not the kind of thing that we should be spending the money on, but if it's not going to deprive an individual of an opportunity to serve their country if they otherwise don't, then I think they ought to be able to do that."