Koch groups slam GOP health care replacement plan as 'Obamacare 2.0'

Fredreka Schouten | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption What to know about the GOP healthcare bill House Republicans have unveiled their replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act. The plan differs from Obamacare in various ways.

WASHINGTON — Deep-pocketed groups tied to conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch on Tuesday denounced the House Republicans leaders' plan to repeal and replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act and signaled they are willing to spend heavily to ensure its defeat.

"As the bill stands today, it is Obamacare 2.0," the leaders of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the main funding arm of the Koch network, said in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and other key committee chairmen. "We cannot support it."

The Kochs' network of donors have plowed big sums — $42 million on TV ads during the 2016 election alone — to help Republicans in Congress retain their majority and push for the defeat of President Obama's signature health-care law. The network also has dispatched thousands of activists to rallies and marches to oppose the law since it was first debated in Congress in 2009.

Their opposition to the House Republican bill comes as other conservative outside groups, including Heritage Action and Club for Growth, slammed the measure — underscoring the bitter debate that lies ahead as congressional Republicans and President Trump look to unravel the sweeping health-care law.

At a Capitol Hill rally Tuesday attended by about 200 Koch-aligned activists, Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips warned that Republicans "will have the shortest-lived majority in the modern era" of they don't toss the law on "the ash heap of history."

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The House Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare eliminates the mandate that most Americans have health insurance and replaces it with a system of income-based tax credits to encourage people to buy insurance on the open market. Luke Hilgemann, Americans for Prosperity's CEO, said those tax credits amount to a new government entitlement program, opposed by the free-market conservatives aligned with the Kochs.

Tuesday's rally on the rooftop of a building in sight of the Capitol Dome kicked off what the Koch groups said will be a sustained advertising and grassroots campaign, dubbed "You Promised," to demand that Republicans seize on their unified control of Washington to kill the law.

Activists bused in from Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania were slated to visit congressional offices Tuesday afternoon.

Officials would not disclose a budget for the campaign but indicated they could spend big sums.

"We have spent tens and tens of millions to fully repeal Obamacare, and we'll commit whatever resources" are needed, said Levi Russell, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity. "We plan on seeing it through."