Vote on health-care bill uncertain
WASHINGTON — As the White House pushed the House to approve a major revision of Obamacare, signs emerged Tuesday that GOP leaders are still having difficulty assembling the 216 votes needed to pass the measure and send it to the Senate.
Although an aide to Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Township, said the congressman will vote for the bill, Rep. Mike Turner remains undecided. Adam Howard, the Dayton Republican’s chief of staff, said, “We’re waiting to see what negotiations produce. There’s no bill yet.”
CNN has reported that Turner and 21 other House Republicans are expected to oppose the bill, meaning House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., can only lose one or two more GOP lawmakers for the bill to pass the House.
“I’ve said for awhile that we are weeks away,” said Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Upper Arlington, who is helping count votes for GOP leaders. “I still feel like it will not happen this week. There’s a lot of work to be done. We’ve got to come together and get to a consensus.”
“We’re close, we’re super close,” said Stivers. But later, a spokesman acknowledged even Stivers wants to see the final bill before he commits to backing it.
House conservatives such as Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, helped scuttle a bill in March backed by President Donald Trump and Ryan that would have scrapped much of Obamacare, officially the Affordable Care Act of 2010, and replaced it with a more market-oriented approach.
Jordan and his allies said the original bill retained many of the mandates of Obamacare, such as a requirement that private insurance companies could not charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing health conditions, which Jordan said raises the cost of insurance.
In an effort to win the backing of conservatives, Ryan and GOP leaders revised the bill to allow states to opt out of Obamacare’s requirements on pre-existing conditions as well as a mandate that private insurance companies offer individual policies with a broad range of medical benefits.
But while Jordan has said he will support the revised bill, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told reporters Tuesday, “I just don’t know if it will get through the House,” adding that he believes “preexisting conditions should be covered.”
Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Troy, said the revised bill “falls far short of what I expected it would accomplish,” describing himself as “not enthusiastically yes, but yes.”
As expected, Rep. Jim Renacci of Wadsworth, who is seeking next year’s Republican gubernatorial nomination, told CNN on Tuesday that he would vote for the bill. As a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Renacci also voted in favor of the original bill in March.
Ryan insisted that Republicans were “making very good progress with our members,” but he offered no indication of when a vote might be held on the measure, the New York Times reported. Trump administration officials have said a vote could come as early as today, but as House Republican leaders scrambled to assemble a majority, a quick vote appeared unlikely.
Obamacare extended health coverage to roughly 22 million by offering middleincome Americans federally subsidized individual private plans and expanding Medicaid, the joint federal and state program that pays health costs for low-income people. The revised GOP bill would scale back part of the Medicaid expansion that allowed Gov. John Kasich to provide health coverage to more than 700,000 in Ohio.