Trump blasts Congress after efforts to scrap Obamacare fail
● President hits out in tweet and warns ‘we will return’
president Donald Trump blasted congressional Democrats and “a few Republicans” yesterday over the failure of efforts to rewrite the Obama healthcare law and warned, “we will return”.
Mr Trump’s early morning tweet unleashed a barrage of criticism at Congress over the collapse of the Republican party’s flagship legislative priority. For seven years, the party has pledged to repeal president Barack Obama’s law.
“Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard,” Mr Trump tweeted yesterday, but said, “We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans.”
He added: “As I have always said, let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!”
Two Republican senators - Utah’s Mike Lee and Jerry Moran of Kansas - sealed the measure’s doom late on Monday when they announced they would vote “no” in an initial, critical vote that had been expected as soon as next week.
That meant that at least four of the 52 Republican senators were ready to block the measure - two more than Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell had to spare in the face of unanimous Democratic opposition.
“Regretfully, it is now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful,” Mr Mcconnell said.
It was the second stinging setback on the issue in three weeks for Mr Mcconnell, whose reputation as a legislative mastermind has been marred as he has failed to unite his chamber’s Repubus licans behind a health overhaul package that highlighted sharp divides between conservatives and moderates.
In late June, he abandoned an initial package after he lacked enough support to pass.
Now, Mr Mcconnell said, the Senate would vote on a measure the Republican-run Congress approved in 2015, only to be vetoed by President Obama - a bill repealing much of Obama’s statute, with a two-year delay designed to give lawmakers time to enact a replacement.
Mr Trump embraced that idea last month after an initial version of Mr Mcconnell’s bill collapsed due to Republican divisions, and did so again late on Monday.
“Republicans should just REPEAL failing Obamacare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in!” Mr Trump tweeted.
But the prospects for approving a clean repeal bill followed by work on replacement legislation, even with Mr Trump ready to sign it, seemed uncertain.
Mr Trump and party leaders had started this year embracing that strategy, only to abandon it when it seemed incapable of passing Congress, with many Republicans worried it would cause insurance market and political chaos because of uncertainty that they would approve substi- tute legislation. Mr Mcconnell’s failed bill would have left 22 million uninsured by 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But the vetoed 2015 measure would be even worse, the budget office said last January, producing 32 million additional uninsured people by 2026 - figures that seemed likely to drive a stake into that bill’s prospects.
That would seem to leave Mr Mcconnell with an option he described last month - negotiating with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
That would likely be on a narrower package aimed more at keeping insurers in difficult marketplaces they are either abandoning or imposing rapidly growing premiums.
Mr Schumer said Republicans “should start from scratch and work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health care system.”