Trump: Vote ‘yes’ or we’ll keep ACA
WASHINGTON — Despite a full-court press from President Donald Trump and heavy pressure from GOP leadership, a conservative group of House Republicans effectively delayed a vote Thursday aimed at overhauling the nation’s health-care system.
In return, Trump threw down the gauntlet, in what one Republican called a game
of “high-stakes poker”: Vote today, or he’ll leave Obamacare in place.
The decision, announced by Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, in a closed-door meeting of House Republicans late Thursday, threw into flux the decision by the Freedom Caucus — a group co-founded by Rep. Jim Jordan of Urbana that also includes Rep. Warren Davidson of Troy — to reject the GOP bill designed to replace the 2010 health-care law known as Obamacare. As of late Thursday, House leadership had committed to a vote today.
Jordan said the House will vote on the “manager’s amendment” — the revised version of the original Republican bill. While he acknowledged that measure is closer to what the Freedom Caucus wants, he said it is not one they all support.
“Our focus is to bring back affordable insurance so people can pick a plan that fits their family’s needs,” he said. “All of the mandates and regulations drove up the costs … you’ve gotta remember where we’re at. Where we’re at right now is high premiums and, if you can afford that, you can’t afford the deductible.”
He would not predict how today’s vote would go, saying only, “We’ll see.”
Voting is scheduled to begin as early as 10 a.m.
Earlier in the day, it appeared that the Freedom Caucus had effectively stalled the bill. Republicans had needed the caucus — a group of nearly 40 conservative lawmakers — to help them garner the 216 votes needed to approve the Affordable Care Act replacement. In recent days, the group has been courted heavily, visiting the White House repeatedly as Trump worked to win their votes.
But a final trip Thursday morning to the White House proved fruitless, with members leaving a meeting with the president and Vice President Mike Pence saying they weren’t yet swayed.
The group’s members quickly huddled for hours in a Capitol Hill hearing room to plan their next steps while dozens of reporters mobbed the halls outside, waiting for word.
At 3:30 p.m., members of the GOP leadership made it official: They would delay the vote, with no word early on when it would be rescheduled.
Shortly afterward, Rep. Mike Meadows, the Freedom Caucus chairman from North Carolina, left the meeting along with Jordan. Meadows said Trump had “moved this a very long way” in getting members closer to accepting the bill. Still, no dice.
“I can tell you we’re hopeful as we start to make progress in this negotiation with some of the things that the White House has shared with us,” Meadows said.
He said the group believes that “some of the text and some of things that we were being asked to consider at this point are not in enough of a form to make a good informed decision,” adding that the GOP conservatives were committed “to stay as long as it takes to get this done.”
Davidson spokesman Alexei Woltornist said, “In the current state of the bill, he’s a ‘no,’ but the negotiations have been productive so far and he’s optimistic, and hopefully we can get to the point where all Republican members as a conference can vote yes on something. He’s just glad to be part of the process.”
However, the tricky part of the political equation is that the more Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan do to placate hard-line conservatives, the more they risk losing votes from more-moderate Republicans — as well as possibly lowering the likelihood of Senate passage.
The GOP bill is the culmination of a seven-year effort by congressional Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act — signed seven years ago Thursday — which they complain contains too many mandates, taxes and penalties and did nothing to control premium costs in the individual market.
The 2010 law required private insurers to provide a minimum package of benefits, which includes ambulance services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment. Conservatives have opposed such “essential benefits,” arguing, for example, that offering such minimums drives up the cost of insurance.
The vast majority of Americans already are covered with insurance, either private or through the government. About 156 million Americans receive health insurance through their employers while 55 million seniors are
on Medicare and 74 million low-income people are on Medicaid, the joint federalstate program established in 1965.
Obamacare also expanded Medicaid to allow a family of four earning as much as $33,948 a year to be eligible. Families of four earning between $34,000 and $98,400 a year could receive federal subsidies to buy individual insurance policies through the federal or state marketplaces, known as exchanges.
The House GOP bill would kill the federal subsidies and mandates requiring people to buy insurance and offer a refundable tax credit ranging from $2,000 to $4,000 to allow people to buy individual policies through the 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 lowincome Ohioans.
The Republicans had scheduled the vote even as national polls made it clear that voters oppose their alternative. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday shows that 56 percent of American voters disapprove of the House Republican bill and only 17 percent support it.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday night that because the bill scraps more than a dozen tax increases used to finance the bill and accelerates the tax cuts to the beginning of this year, it would reduce deficits by $150 billion during the next decade.