GOP health bill narrowly passes House
Controversial legislation faces an uncertain fate in the Senate
WASHINGTON — House Republicans narrowly passed a controversial bill to revise the Affordable Care Act, fulfilling a major Trump campaign promise but sending the measure on to an uncertain fate in the closely divided Senate.
Passage in the House by a vote of 217 to 213 capped weeks of fits and starts for the GOP and represented an enormous victory for President Donald Trump, who repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail last year to repeal and replace Obamacare but has struggled to secure legislative wins early in his presidency.
The vote was also a big win for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who has been working on the legislation since January but has failed to unite his ideologically divided caucus.
“Today, this House has the opportunity to do more than just fulfill a promise,” Ryan said to the House chamber moments before the vote. “We have the opportunity to raise our gaze and set a bold course for our country.”
He continued: “This bill delivers on the promises that we have made to the American people. You
know, a lot of us have been waiting seven years to cast this vote. Many of us are here because we pledged to cast this very vote — to repeal and replace Obamacare, to rescue people from this collapsing law. Are we going to meet this test? Are we going to be men and women of our word?”
New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., voted in favor saying it would give New Mexicans more health insurance coverage options.
“New Mexicans deserve a 21st century health care system based on what they need and want, not what Washington thinks is best for them,” Pearce said. “The bill passed in the House today will put the power back into the states’ hands so they can decide what is best for their unique populations and will provide care for everyone, including people with pre-existing conditions, those in high-risk pools, and children who wish to continue being covered under their parent’s plans.”
New Mexico Democratic Reps. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Ben Ray Lujan voted against the bill.
Several White House aides began Thursday morning by texting each other and reporters with two words: “game day.”
“We’ll have the votes. This will pass,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., vowed on Thursday morning.
Democrats, meanwhile, predicted that the measure would be devastating for Americans’ health care coverage but also, on a political level, for Republicans who voted for it.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., noted that many Americans can’t name their member of Congress, but that Thursday’s vote is set to capture the nation’s ire.
“You will glow in the dark on this one,” Pelosi warned. “So don’t walk the plank, especially unnecessarily.”
The vote caps a haphazard debate that included few public hearings and the hasty revision of key sections of the bill during closed-door meetings at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue designed to secure votes from skeptical conservatives and moderates initially unwilling to support the legislation.
Despite more than six years of campaign pledges to undo the ACA and the recent changes to the legislation, several Republican lawmakers admitted Thursday that they have not read the bill or ignored questions about their understanding of the bill that were shouted by reporters. Republicans have accused Democrats in the past of ramming their health care bill through without giving members a chance to absorb it — but on Thursday they insisted that they are not doing the same thing.
They argued that their health care bill is only several hundred pages long, compared with the size of the Affordable Care Act, which ran several thousand pages.
Democrats “put a 2,000 page bill on the table they knew no one had time to read, and we’re not doing that,” said Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, R-Va.
“This is a rough and tumble exercise that the Founding Fathers anticipated,” he added.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said he was willing to abandon his previous demands that leaders allow hearings and discussion of the legislation because members had opportunities to weigh in on amendments over the past several days.
The decision marks a significant shift for hard-line Freedom Caucus members who have insisted that leaders give them ample time to read legislation and weigh in before a bill comes up for a vote.
Republicans also disregarded the absence of a final cost estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office -— Congress’s official scorekeeper — on how much the bill would cost and how many people would receive health care coverage. Several said that last-minute changes to the legislation won’t significantly change the final estimates.