Rubio said he’d be more likely to vote for a bill that resembled a proposal he advanced when he ran for president. | AP Photo Rubio ducks questions about supporting House Obamacare repeal



MIAMI — Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won’t say how he’ll vote on the House’s Obamacare repeal because, he says, “it’s still a work in progress” in the U.S. House where there’s lots of “drama.”

Rubio’s reticence to talk specifics stands in stark contrast to fellow Republican senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz — who also ran for president against Donald Trump but have both panned the bill as written in the House. Rubio’s fellow Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, has said he’s a no.


Like Rubio, Florida Gov. Rick Scott refuses to give his opinion about the details of the bill, which repeals Obamacare but could leave millions more people in Florida and nationwide without health insurance than under current law. Scott says the measure is "way better than Obamacare." Unlike Scott, Rubio said he’ll say more if or when the measure passes Thursday in the House, which is no guarantee.

“There’s nothing before us,” Rubio told POLITICO Wednesday.

The senator hasn’t just avoided specifics with the press. He has avoided critics and raucous town halls, where constituents and activists have demanded that other GOP lawmakers keep Obamacare. Meanwhile, Cruz said he flew down to Rubio’s home state and met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate — about an hour’s drive from Rubio’s West Miami home — to recommend changes to the legislation. Trump, meanwhile, has lobbied members of the House to pass the legislation, dubbed "Trumpcare."

When asked why he’s relatively silent while Cruz and Paul are vocal, Rubio said that his colleagues are “making a different decision about approaching the House bill. [The House is] working on it, when they send it over to us our work will begin.”

Rubio said he’d be more likely to vote for a bill that resembled a proposal he advanced when he ran for president.

That plan called for reduced insurance regulations, conservative reforms to Medicaid and Medicare, and big tax credits for those who buy insurance not provided by an employer.

When he was Florida House Speaker, Rubio pushed through a health reform plan that was a flop. Florida had one of the highest rates of the uninsured in the nation and that rate only began to notably tick down after Obamacare was passed and required people to buy insurance.

Rubio, a staunch Obamacare opponent, said he wanted to repeal it in the right way.

“I don’t want to replace Obamacare with a Republican version of Obamacare,” Rubio told the conservative Shark Tank blog earlier Wednesday.

“The fundamental question for me is not just does it repeal Obamacare, but does it make things better than Obamacare?” Rubio also said. “It’s not enough to repeal it — repeal it is obviously important and I support repealing Obamacare — but also when you talk about replacing it, we want to have something that is better than Obamacare, not something that has unintended consequences in the other direction.”

In another Wednesday interview, with WOKV News Radio in Jacksonville, Rubio reiterated his proposal for tax credits to help people buy health insurance and, like Gov. Scott and other Republican lawmakers, he said Florida should not be punished for refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.

“How does this treat Florida on Medicaid?” Rubio asked rhetorically. “Does it treat us fairly compared to all these other states who expanded Medicaid and now are going to get extra money because they did that, and that’s not fair to Florida who I believe did the fiscally right thing.”

But when asked if he’d vote yes or no on the House bill, Rubio wouldn’t say.

“I’m not going to comment on the House bill ‘cause it’s still a work in progress,” Rubio told the station. “By the time I give you a statement now, that bill could change in the next 12 hours and then I'm on record as supporting something that changed … I have to wait and see what the House produces because they’ve got their own drama going on over there.”