GOP leaders pull health care bill
WASHINGTON — In a humiliating setback, President Donald Trump and GOP leaders pulled their “Obamacare” repeal bill off the House floor at the end of last week after it became clear the measure would fail badly.
It was a stunning defeat for the new president after he had demanded House Republicans vote on the legislation on March 24, threatening to leave “Obamacare” in place and move on to other issues if the vote failed. The bill was withdrawn minutes before the vote was to occur.
The president’s gamble failed. Instead Trump, who campaigned as a master deal-maker and claimed that he alone could fix the nation’s health care system, saw his ultimatum rejected by Republican lawmakers who made clear they answer to their own voters, not to the president.
Republicans have spent seven years campaigning against former President Barack Obama’s health care law, and cast dozens of votes to repeal it in full or in part. But when they finally got the chance to pass a repeal bill that actually had a chance to get signed, they couldn’t pull it off.
What happens next is unclear, but the path ahead on other priorities, such as overhauling the tax code, can only grow more daunting.
Locally, that uncertainty is a potential problem f or Polk Medical Cent e r, which is getting ready to look ahead to the 2018 fiscal year and needs to know what future plans are in store for the health care law. Matt Gorman, Polk Medical Center’s hospital administrator, said on Friday their main concerns with the bill as it stood was the likelihood of seeing costs going uncovered for those in need of emergency care.
“I think we’re concerned about anything that results in fewer patients being insured,” he said. “The Congressional Budget Office weighed in on this and said that 20 million or more Americans can lose coverage under the proposed plan. That’s certainly a big problem for us.”
Gorman said too that with the lack of a clear position on the bill over the past weeks and changing landscape of what the repeal and replacement legislation was proposing, it made looking ahead in their budgeting process all that more difficult.
“Uncertainty is always a significant concern,” Gorman said. “We try the best that we can to be flexible and responsive to what happens at the Federal or State level... Not knowing and not being able to plan for what might come out of Washington creates a good deal of concern.”
Especially with the promise of Medicaid cuts on the national level, which could contribute to more patients not being able to cover the costs of hospital bills when they need the care, since the State of Georgia has not increased their funding for their Medicaid program.
“The other side of that coin is that if we have to cover the costs of emergency care at the hospital, then we can’t also afford to help patients in the community with preventative care and services,” Gorman said. “On a fundamental level its a financial concern, but there’s also a real personal aspect to this issue.”
He added after the bill was pulled that it keeping Obamacare for the time being was better than a replacement that would be more costly in the long term.
“The Affordable Care Act has a number of flaws, but replacing it with a plan that’s predicted to reduce access to healthcare isn’t a step in the right direction. Given the CBO’s assessment, it’s probably wise that the American Health Care Act was withdrawn for now,” Gorman said. “Congress should take this opportunity to design a plan that provides greater access to care and more flexibility for consumers to choose the type of coverage that best meets the needs of their family.”
With the failure for a vote on the bill, Trump is certain to be weakened politically, a big early congressional defeat adding to the continuing inquiries into his presidential campaign’s Russia connections and his unfounded wiretapping allegations against Obama.
The development came on the afternoon of a day when the bill, which had been delayed a day earlier, was supposed to come to a vote, come what may. But instead of picking up support as March 24 wore on, the bill went the other direction, with some key lawmakers coming out in opposition.
Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, chairman of a major committee, Appropriations, said the bill would raise costs unacceptably on his constituents. Rep. Barbara Comstock of Virginia, a key moderate Republican, and GOP Rep. David Joyce of Ohio also announced “no” votes.
The defections raised the possibility that the bill would not only lose on the floor, but lose big.
In the face of that evidence, and despite insistences from White House officials and Ryan that Friday was the day to vote, leadership pulled back from the brink.
The GOP bill would have eliminated the Obama statute’s unpopular fines on people who do not obtain coverage and would also have removed the often-generous subsidies for those who purchase insurance.
Republican tax credits would have been based on age, not income like Obama’s, and the tax boosts Obama imposed on higher-earning people and health care companies would have been repealed. The bill would have ended Obama’s Medicaid expansion and trimmed future federal financing for the federal-state program, letting states impose work requirements on some of the 70 million beneficiaries.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the Republican bill would have resulted in 24 million additional uninsured people in a decade and lead to higher out-ofpocket medical costs for many lower-income and people just shy of age 65 when they would become eligible for Medicare. The bill would have blocked federal payments for a year to Planned Parenthood.
Democrats were uniformly opposed. “This bill is pure greed, and real people will suffer and die from it,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state.
AP writers Matthew Daly, Kevin Freking, Mary Clare Jalonick, Richard Lardner, Stephen Ohlemacher, Vivian Salama, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Ken Thomas contributed to this report. SJ Editor Kevin Myrick reported on this story locally.