Page 8A
HEALTH CARE
East Oregonian
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Obamacare repeal taken off life support
Trump blames Dems
for lack of support,
though GOP votes
weren’t there either
Tax reform next on agenda
By ERICA WERNER AND
ALAN FRAM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — In a
humiliating failure, President
Donald Trump and GOP
leaders yanked their bill to
repeal “Obamacare” off the
House floor Friday when it
became clear it would fail
badly — after seven years of
nonstop railing against the
health care law.
Democrats said Americans
can “breathe a sigh of relief.”
Trump said Obama’s law was
imploding “and soon will
explode.”
Thwarted by two factions
of fellow Republicans, from
the center and far right, House
Speaker Paul Ryan said
President Barack Obama’s
health care law, the GOP’s
No. 1 target in the new Trump
administration, will remain
in place “for the foreseeable
future.”
It was a stunning defeat for
the new president after he had
demanded House Republicans
delay no longer and vote on the
legislation Friday, pass or fail.
His 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.
He had “never said repeal
and replace it in 64 days,” a
dejected but still combative
Trump said at the White
House, though he had repeat-
edly shouted during the pres-
idential campaign that it was
going down “immediately.”
The bill was withdrawn
just minutes before the
House vote was to occur, and
lawmaker said there were
no plans to revisit the issue.
Republicans will try to move
ahead on other agenda items,
including overhauling the tax
code, though the failure on
the health bill can only make
whatever comes next immea-
surably harder.
Trump pinned the blame
on Democrats.
“With
no
Democrat
support we couldn’t quite get
there,” he told reporters in
the Oval Office. “We learned
about loyalty, we learned a
lot about the vote-getting
process.”
The Obama law was
approved in 2010 with no
Republican votes.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., one
of the stewards of the Republican health care legislation, walks through Statuary
Hall after leaving the Capitol Hill office of House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., Friday.
“We gave it our best shot. That’s it. It’s done.
D-O-N-E done. This bill is dead.”
— Greg Walden, R-Oregon
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., an-
nounces that he is pulling the troubled
Republican health care overhaul bill off
the House floor, short of votes and eager
to avoid a humiliating defeat for Presi-
dent Donald Trump and GOP leaders, at
the Capitol in Washington, Friday.
President Donald Trump about the health
care overhaul bill Friday in the Oval Of-
fice of the White House in Washington.
Trump says he would be willing to re-
open negotiations for a health care bill
with Democrats if the Affordable Care
Act fails.
Despite reports of back-
biting from administration
officials toward Ryan, Trump
said: “I like Speaker Ryan.
... I think Paul really worked
hard.”
For his part, Ryan told
reporters: “We came really
close today but we came
up short. ... This is a disap-
pointing day for us.” He said
the president has “really been
fantastic.”
But when asked how
Republicans could face voters
after their failure to make
good on years of promises,
Ryan quietly said: “It’s a really
good question. I wish I had a
better answer for you.”
Last fall, Republicans used
the issue to gain and keep
control of the White House,
Senate and House. During
the previous years, they had
cast dozens of votes to repeal
Obama’s law in full or in part,
but when they finally got the
chance to pass a repeal version
that actually had a chance to
become law, they couldn’t
deliver.
Democrats could hardly
contain their satisfaction.
“Today is a great day for
our country, what happened
on the floor is a victory for
the American people,” said
House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi, who as speaker
herself helped Obama pass the
Affordable Care Act in the first
place. “Let’s just for a moment
breathe a sigh of relief for the
American people.”
The outcome leaves both
Ryan and Trump weakened
politically.
For the president, this piles
a big early congressional
defeat onto the continuing
inquiries into his presidential
campaign’s Russia connec-
tions and his unfounded wire-
tapping allegations against
Obama.
Ryan was not able to corral
the House Freedom Caucus,
the restive band of conserva-
tives that ousted the previous
speaker. Those Republicans
wanted the bill to go much
further, while some GOP
moderates felt it went too far.
Instead of picking up
support as Friday wore on, the
bill went the other direction,
with several key lawmakers
coming out in opposition.
Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen
of New Jersey, chairman of a
major committee, Appropria-
tions, said the bill would raise
costs unacceptably on his
constituents.
The defections raised the
possibility that the bill would
not only lose on the floor, but
lose big.
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
WASHINGTON (AP)
— Now that the effort
to overhaul the nation’s
health care system has
collapsed, the Trump
administration is turning
its attention to tax reform.
President
Donald
Trump and Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin
said Friday that the admin-
istration will now focus
on gaining congressional
approval for a sweeping
tax overhaul plan.
Trump’s
comments
came after Republicans
were forced to cancel a
House vote on their bill
to repeal and replace
the Affordable Care Act
because they could not
get the support needed for
passage.
After
Republicans
pulled the health measure,
Trump told reporters at the
White House, “I would say
that we will probably start
going very, very strongly
for the big tax cuts and tax
reform. That will be next.”
While the GOP deci-
sion to pull the health
care proposal could be an
ominous sign for tax cuts
and the rest of Trump’s
legislative agenda, Trump
was more optimistic,
saying, “now we’re going
to go for tax reform, which
I’ve always liked.”
Earlier in the day,
Mnuchin,
the
presi-
dent’s chief economic
spokesman, suggested that
tax reform might be easier
to sell in Congress.
“Health care is a
very complicated issue,”
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 Congres-
sional Budget Office said
the Republican bill would
have resulted in 24 million
additional uninsured people
in a decade and lead to higher
out-of-pocket 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.
Mnuchin said. “In a way,
tax reform is a lot simpler.”
During a morning
interview, Mnuchin said he
had been overseeing work
on the administration’s bill
over the past two months
and it would be introduced
soon. He said it would be
one proposal that would
cover both cutting indi-
vidual and corporate taxes
in the same legislation.
“We are not cutting this
up and doing little pieces at
a time,” Mnuchin said.
He said the goal was
still to win congressional
approval of the tax
measure by August. But
if the timeline is delayed,
he said he expected the
proposal to pass by the fall.
At the White House,
press secretary Sean Spicer
acknowledged the August
deadline is an “ambitious
one” for such a compre-
hensive and complicated
project, but he said it’s a
goal the administration “is
going to try to stick to.”
“Tax reform is some-
thing the president is very
committed to,” Spicer told
reporters. Mnuchin had
lunch at the White House
Friday with Trump and
House Speaker Paul Ryan.
In his earlier appear-
ance, Mnuchin did not
reveal whether the admin-
istration will include a
contentious border adjust-
ment tax that is in a House
tax proposal. The measure,
which would impose a 20
percent tax on imports,
has positive and negative
features, Mnuchin said.
Republicans had never
built a constituency for the
legislation, and in the end the
nearly uniform opposition
from hospitals, doctors,
nurses, the AARP, consumer
groups and others weighed
heavily with many members.
On the other side, conser-
vative groups including the
Koch outfit argued the legisla-
tion did not go far enough in
uprooting Obamacare.
Ryan made his announce-
ment to lawmakers at a very
brief meeting, where he was
greeted by a standing ovation
in recognition of the support
he still enjoys from many
lawmakers.
When the gathering broke
up, Rep. Greg Walden of
Oregon, chairman of the
Energy and Commerce
Committee that helped write
the bill, told reporters: “”We
gave it our best shot. That’s it.
It’s done. D-O-N-E done. This
bill is dead.”
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