Scramble on for health-care votes
WASHINGTON — After seven years of vowing to kill Obamacare, House Republicans are scrambling to assemble the 216 votes they need today to scrap the 2010 Affordable Care Act and substitute their own version.
During a White House meeting, President Donald Trump urged a group of House Republicans — including newly announced 2018 gubernatorial candidate Jim Renacci of Wadsworth — to support the bill championed by House GOP leaders that would nullify a series of taxes and mandates used to extend health coverage to more than 20 million people. Trump reportedly dangled possible changes to the bill as a sweetener.
In addition, Vice President Mike Pence met at the White House with conservative
Republican opponents of the bill led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Urbana. With every House Democrat expected to vote against the GOP bill, if Jordan and at least 21 others break with their leadership, the bill will fail.
In a count by The Associated Press, at least 25 Republicans said they opposed the bill and others were leaning that way. The number was in constant flux amid eleventh-hour lobbying by the White House and GOP leaders.
A source familiar with the Jordan meeting said Pence did not appear to persuade any of the conservatives to support the bill. Appearing on MSNBC earlier in the day, Jordan said unless
GOP leaders agree to “fundamental change, I do not see how they get to the 216 number that they need to pass it.”
“This bill does not repeal Obamacare, and that fundamentally is why we’re opposed to it,” Jordan said. “The only thing worse than doing nothing is doing the wrong thing.”
But a House Republican who spoke on condition of anonymity sounded more optimistic, saying, “I think it is moving in the right direction. It’s a question of time.” To that end, members of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-line group of which Jordan is a member, were expected at the White House early today.
Jeff Sadosky, a Republican consultant in Washington and former adviser to Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, said if House GOP leaders “are within 10 to 15 votes, it won’t be pretty and the vote will be open for hours, but they’ll beg, borrow and arm-twist their way to 216.”
Passed over the unanimous opposition of Republicans, the 2010 Obama law extended health coverage by offering middle-class people federally subsidized insurance policies in the individual market, and by expanding eligibility for low-income people to be covered by Medicaid, the joint federal and state program from 1965 that provides health care for the poor.
The House GOP bill would kill the federal subsidies and mandates requiring people to buy insurance and offer instead a refundable tax credit ranging from $2,000 to $4,000 to allow people to buy individual policies through federal or state marketplaces known as exchanges.
In addition, the GOP bill would scale back a feature of Obamacare that allowed Gov. John Kasich to use hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicaid to provide health coverage to more than 700,000 in Ohio.
Jordan used his appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to criticize Kasich’s Medicaid decision, saying he “respectfully” disagreed “with our good governor. I just think he’s wrong on this.”
“Some people view success as signing people up for government health care, signing people up for Medicaid,” Jordan said. “If our plan, the conservative plan, is approved, you will actually bring back affordable insurance. And that’s how we define success — bringing back insurance that’s affordable for working-class people.”
Emmalee Kalmbach, a Kasich spokeswoman, responded by saying “the governor firmly believes that helping people get back on their feet is essential to our workforce and continuing Ohio’s successful track record of job creation. We appreciate support from those who understand that, and we are optimistic that we can get this in the right place.”
But even if Republicans push the bill through the House, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio told reporters on a conference call Wednesday that he “would assume this bill will not pass the Senate,” where Republicans control just 52 seats.
Instead, Brown said, he is open to working with Senate Republicans to make changes in Obamacare, acknowledging the law is “not perfect.”
Brown said “the biggest problem” with Obamacare is “there aren’t enough young healthy people in the insurance pool. Anybody that has health
insurance, anybody who knows anything about this, understands costs go up too much when you have mostly sicker, older people in (the) insurance pool.”
In a floor speech, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told Republicans that he understands their predicament of being “caught between a rock and hard place, between the prospect of failing to fulfill a shrill and not-thought-through campaign pledge and a bill that would badly hurt millions of Americans, particularly your voters. I say to you, there is a way out.”
The New York Democrat’s path: “Drop your efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Democrats will work with you on serious proposals to improve the existing law.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week concluded that the House Republican bill would increase the number of uninsured Americans to 24 million by 2026.
In a show of support for the opponents, the conservative Koch network promised Wednesday night to spend millions of dollars to defeat the health-care overhaul, the influential network’s most aggressive move against the bill.