Ryan says House to revisit health care, offers no details

WASHINGTON » Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday he’s going to give battered House Republicans another crack at a health care overhaul. But he offered no timeline, and leaders haven’t resolved how to overcome the deep GOP divisions that crumpled their legislation last week in a humiliating retreat for themselves and President Donald Trump.

“We are all going to work together and listen together until we get this right,” Ryan told reporters after House Republicans met for the first time since he averted a Friday vote on a GOP health care bill that faced certain defeat. “It is just too important.”

The doomed GOP bill would have eliminated former President Barack Obama’s mandate for people to carry insurance or face fines and would have shrunk a Medicaid expansion. It relied on tax credits to help consumers purchase insurance that for many people would be less generous than under Obama’s statute.

Republican lawmakers, conservatives and moderates alike, emerged from Tuesday’s meeting saying there was a consensus to address the issue again, preferably soon. The closeddoor meeting lasted nearly two hours, causing Ryan to delay his news conference.

“You don’t go anywhere until this is accomplished. That’s how we do things on the battlefield, that’s how things should be done here,” said freshman Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., an Army veteran who lost both legs after being wounded in Afghanistan.

After the meeting, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., said that unless the issue is revisited in a month, he would force the House to vote on a bill that goes further than Ryan’s derailed measure in repealing Obama’s 2010 law.

Brooks is in in the conservative House Freedom Caucus, most of whom opposed the failed GOP bill, which was pivotal in the collapse of the party’s top priority so far this year. They complained it didn’t go far enough in erasing Obama’s statute.

“We’ll find out who is truly for repeal of Obamacare and who is not,” Brooks said.

The leader of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said his group was talking to moderate Republicans. Many of them also opposed the leadership’s failed bill because it would have pried health coverage from millions of voters.

“Obviously everybody wants to find a way to get this passed and we’re going to work real hard to do that,” said Meadows.

Republicans say they will now pivot to tax cuts and other issues while they try working out their differences. And they’ve offered mixed messages on what comes next.