(Radio Iowa) – Iowa First District Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks joined the House Republican leadership as they introduced their version of a healthcare bill Monday. The Republican from Ottumwa says the bill includes provisions that would allow small businesses and self-employed workers to more easily purchase health care together.

“This bill puts patients and their doctors over the profits of insurance companies. The Democrat solution is to continue riding taxpayer funded blank checks to large insurance companies,” Miller-Meeks says. Miller-Meeks says there needs to be an alternative to extending the tax credits paid out under the Affordable Care Act. Democrats favor the extension.

“It hides the fact that premiums are going up by shifting who pays for those increase in premiums rather than getting to the root cause of actually lowering healthcare costs,” she says. “We want to make the, you know, all Americans, families and patients, the C-E-O’s of their own healthcare decisions.” Miller-Meeks says the Republican House plan would also require pharmacy benefit managers to share more data on the actual cost of prescription drugs.

“Just the transparency alone what the fees are, where the fees go, what the rebates are, what the list price of a drug…I think transparency is the first step in that, but it’s not the only step,” she says. Miller-Meeks is running for re-election. The

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Katie Smith released a statement that says “Mariannette Miller-Meeks has spent her entire year attacking Iowans’ health care, from voting for the largest Medicaid cuts in history that will decimate rural hospitals, to opposing plans to prevent Iowans’ health care costs from skyrocketing. Now, Miller-Meeks has made herself the face of Washington Republicans’ so-called ‘plan’ that does nothing to lower costs, and Iowans will hold her accountable for failing them next year.”