Sen. Rand Paul Tuesday said he remains against the Senate Republicans' healthcare bill, as it keeps the insurance mandate, a "fundamental flaw" of Obamacare.
"If you tell people they can buy insurance after they're sick, they will," the Kentucky Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" co-anchor Bill Hemmer.
"If you have mandates that make it expensive for young healthy people to buy it, they won't buy it."
The mandates will result in the "death spiral of Obamacare," Paul continued, and "if you don't fix that, and you simply pass a Republican bill that maintains the death spiral of Obamacare, that's a big, huge mistake."
Paul said he met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last week, and that he's sent him some requests about how the Republican bill can be made better, but he's gotten "zero responses that they're interested in any of my suggestions."
Senate Republicans, he continued, are "at an impasse. Eventually they will talk to me if they want my vote."
But at this point, "they're going in the opposite direction, and the way that Washington typically works, they get your vote by offering you more money for a cause. I am a fiscal conservative, so throwing more money makes me less likely to vote."
Paul said he's also "aghast and appalled" at an insurance company bailout being included in the Republican bill.
"It is a terrible idea," said Paul. "It is very un-Republican. It is not conservative, and has nothing to do with capitalism. It has to do with crony capitalism."
Another alternative, which Paul champions, is a "clean repeal" of Obamacare.
"Let's repeal, separate that from all the big government spending programs, and put it into a separate bill that maybe Democrats and big government Republican may like, but conservatives like myself will not vote for," said Paul.
If McConnell and other Senate Republicans want the conservative vote, he continued, the bill needs to "strip away all of the extra big government spending, and put that into another bill."
"You can work with Democrats for all I care on that bill," said Paul. "I will not support that. I will vote for clean repeal."
He also said he thinks that McConnell's statement that the party will work with Democrat to get a bill passed is "giving up on something we promised for [the past] six or seven years," and it's "insane."
"I think Republicans will be very unhappy if the Republican leadership gives up and works for Democrats," said Paul. "I think what they need to do and say they need to work on everything. Let's do what we promise, which is repeal Obamacare."
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