Sen. Rand Paul Statement on Today's Healthcare Vote

Statement

Today is a big day. We're taking the first steps toward voting on repealing Obamacare.

As most of you know, I've been a loud voice in Congress for some time. In fact, I was elected on the promise to vote to completely repeal Obamacare.

And we're not going to get a vote on complete repeal; we're going to get a vote on partial repeal -- which is better than what they've been offering.

There will also be another alternative; there will basically be the alternative I've advocated for which is a clean repeal and then there's going to be a big government Senate leadership bill that will have a massive insurance bailout fund attached to it, and who knows what else, I mean they are dumping the kitchen sink of pork into the Senate leadership bill.

I'm going to vote no on that one and I will vote for the clean repeal. We don't know which way it will go. If every Republican who voted for clean repeal in the past actually votes for it, it would actually pass and this would be a great step forward towards repealing Obamacare. But expectations are it may not pass, but expectations also are that because of the work of conservatives we are going to defeat the Senate leadership bill which is a big huge insurance bailout. So that's good news also.

The bill then I think is going to the process to probably what people are calling skinny repeal, meaning all 52 Republicans will start voting on amendments, and the things that we can get 50 votes on, we'll put into a new bill, called a skinny repeal bill. And this also will be a step in the right direction but important for all of us to know that much of Obamacare will remain, not that we don't want to get rid of it, conservatives do, some don't, we want to get rid of all of it but some of it's going to remain.

There's still going to be problems in healthcare and I think we should do what we can now and continue to advocate, we need more grassroots support for repeal, the thing is that we have so many weak kneed Republicans now and they need reminding that Obamacare is a disaster for the country.

So if everybody wakes up, calls their Representative, calls their Senator, maybe we can still in the future come back and revisit this and try to repeal Obamacare. My hope is that we're going to repeal some of it now.

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