MSNBC hosts Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle on Wednesday got in a heated back and forth with Rep. Michael Burgess (R., Texas) over the Affordable Care Act and the Trump administration's willingness to work with Democrats to change it.
Burgess started by discussing cost-sharing subsidies that were ruled illegal by a district court judge in 2016 because Congress never appropriated the money. The ruling was appealed and is still playing out in the courts.
"The cost-sharing reduction issue came about because of an error in drafting the first Affordable Care Act. Those appropriations were being made or those dollars being made without an appropriation and that was illegal," Burgess said.
"The House sued the president. We were told we would never have standing to do so," he continued. "We were given standing then we won at the district court level with the suit filed against the Obama administration. This was kind of a big deal as House members asserting their Article I, Article II—"
"Right, OK, I hear you, sir," Velshi interjected. "We put a map, maybe you didn't see it. You know your state of Texas has one of the largest shares of Americans enrolled in Obamacare who gets cost-sharing reductions."
"So, the legal standing aside, you guys get a lot of the money," Velshi continued.
"Why was it not done correctly in the first place?" Burgess asked. "If the entirety of the Affordable Care Act is teetering on the brink because of the want of $8 billion with the number of billions of dollars, hundreds of billion dollars involved in this bill, it begs the question, how stable is the program overall?"
"Well, no, that's got to do with the, that's a multiplier effect, right?" Velshi said.
"The issue is the law itself, correct?" Burgess responded.
"The fact is it's a multiplier effect, right? It's all of the insurance companies who aren't sure the money will be paid so they make decisions that have much greater impact than $8 billion," Velshi said. "So you would agree with me as a doctor yourself, you would agree that the insurance companies depend on a certain amount of stability in the planning."
"That instability has been there from day one, the way the law was drafted," Burgess said.
"There was no instability in the cost-sharing reductions," Velshi responded.
After the subsidies were declared illegal, the Obama administration appealed them and the Trump administration inherited the case.
Moving on from the cost-sharing reductions discussion, Velshi asked Burgess about universal health care.
"Let's move to the future. You're a doctor and know more about patients than Stephanie and I do because you've seen them, spent your life talking to patients," Velshi said. "Every other rich country in the world, 34 out of 35 rich countries except for the United States have universal health coverage. Fifty-eight other countries have universal health coverage. They all have some version of a mandate, right? You know that. The concept of universal health coverage means everybody has to have it. If you look at Switzerland, which I think you would like, everybody has to have coverage, and yet it's all private insurance."
Burgess said "no" quietly to himself as Velshi mentioned Switzerland. He also told Velshi that Obamacare's mandate is coercive and wrong and brought up how he has gotten some traction with the Trump administration on fixing problems with the Affordable Care Act.
"I have a theory on that one. You might be getting more traction with the Trump administration because you're a Republican and so is he?" Ruhle asked.
"I think you will see more Democrats have been down to the White House during the Trump administration than Republicans went down during the Obama administration," Burgess said. "The Trump administration has been fairly open to some ideas—sometimes it's a little concerning how open they are—but they've been willing to have discussions. I don't think you can deny that."