Trump orders swift remake
President-elect Donald Trump demanded Tuesday that Congress immediately repeal the Affordable Care Act and pass another health law quickly. His remarks put Republicans in the nearly impossible position of having only weeks to draft a replacement for a health law that took nearly two years to pass.
“We have to get to business,” Trump told The New York Times in a telephone interview. “Obamacare has been a catastrophic event.”
Trump appeared to be unclear both about the timing of already scheduled votes in Congress and about the difficulty of his demand — a repeal vote “probably some time next week” and a replacement “very quickly or simultaneously, very shortly thereafter.”
But he was clear on one point: Plans by congressional Republicans to repeal the health law now, then take years to create and implement a replacement law are unacceptable to the incoming president.
Republican leaders have made the repeal of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement a top priority. They hope that the Senate will vote on Thursday and the House will vote on Friday to approve parliamentary language created to protect repeal legislation from a filibuster in the Senate.
House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who consults often with Trump, set out a similar timetable Tuesday, saying that a bill to repeal the health care law would include some legislation to replace aspects of it, though Republicans have yet to agree on the details of their alternative.
“It is our goal to bring it all together concurrently,” Ryan said.
But those ambitions will be difficult to achieve and will almost certainly require Democratic cooperation. Until now, Republicans could vote to repeal Obama’s health law with no fear that they would have to live with the political consequences of scuttling a law that provides health care for 20 million Americans and protects millions more from discrimination for pre-existing medical conditions, ends lifetime caps on insurance coverage and allows children to remain on their parents’ insurance policies until age 26.
With complete control of Washington, what comes next in health policy will belong to the Republican Party. For several days, congressional Republicans of diverse political views — moderates and conservatives alike — have been saying they are nervous about repealing the law without any clear path forward. Five Senate Republicans have pressed to delay the deadline for committees to produce repeal legislation until March and several House Republicans are also demanding that the pace slow down.
“In an ideal situation, we would repeal and replace Obamacare simultaneously, but we need to make sure that we have at least a detailed framework that tells the American people what direction we’re headed,” said one of those five Republicans, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
As it stands, the budget resolution that will fast-track that vote gives Senate and House committees until Jan. 27 to write legislation that would repeal major provisions of the health care law. But the schedule for action on that legislation, its effective date and the timetable for phasing in a new system of health insurance coverage are all unresolved questions.
Even the Jan. 27 deadline is not enforceable or particularly meaningful, Senate aides said, indicating that Congress could follow any timetable its leaders might prescribe.
That uncertainty apparently persuaded Trump to leap into the fray. Not only did he try to steel Republican spines, but he threatened Democrats who might stand in his way, saying he would campaign against them, especially in states that he won in November.
Aides to Ryan said the effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act would include not only the main bill that would be protected from a filibuster in the Senate, but also legislation that would not enjoy such protections. That legislation would take Democratic cooperation to be passed, because Senate Republicans are eight votes short of a filibusterproof majority.
Congressional Democrats say that the Affordable Care Act, far from being in a “death spiral,” is one of the best health laws since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. And the Obama administration reported Tuesday that more than 11.5 million people nationwide had signed up for health insurance or been automatically re-enrolled under the Affordable Care Act as of Dec. 24, 2016, an increase of nearly 300,000 from this time last year.
“Today’s data show that this market is not merely stable, it is actually on track for growth,” Aviva Aron-Dine, a senior counselor to Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said in a conference call with reporters.
The fourth annual open enrollment period started Nov. 1 and ends Jan. 31.