Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Health Care Briefing

House Passes G.O.P. Bill to Repeal Obamacare

■ President Trump declared victory in the Rose Garden. “I’m president! Can you believe it?”

■ The legislation still faces steep hurdles in the Senate.

■ But Mr. Trump threatened to damage the Affordable Care Act on his own.

Image
Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, spoke at a rally outside the Capitol on Thursday.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

With the vote Thursday, Republicans recovered from their earlier failures and moved a step closer to delivering their promise to reshape American health care without mandated insurance coverage.

The vote, 217-to-213, on President Trump’s 105th day in office, keeps alive the Republican dream of unwinding the signature legislative achievement of former President Barack Obama. The House measure faces profound uncertainty in the Senate, where the legislation’s steep spending cuts will almost certainly be moderated. Any legislation that can get through the Senate will again have to clear the House and its conservative majority.

Read more »

President Trump on Thursday declared victory in his push to repeal the Affordable Care Act and overhaul the nation’s health system without mandated coverage, saying the plan would bring down costs for Americans.

“Yes, premiums will be coming down; yes, deductibles will be coming down, but very importantly, it is a great plan,” Mr. Trump said in White House Rose Garden, flanked by Republican lawmakers. It was the kind of exuberant event typically reserved for legislation that is being signed into law, rather than a controversial bill that has narrowly passed one chamber and faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

Video
Video player loading
President Trump congratulated Republican members of the House after the passage of a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act.CreditCredit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

But Mr. Trump was eager to savor the moment. Just over a month ago, he suffered a humiliating defeat on the health care plan when House leaders were forced to abruptly cancel a planned vote on the legislation because of opposition from within their own ranks, even after a burst of personal lobbying from the president.

“We want to brag about the plan,” Mr. Trump said, after asking those assembled how he was doing in his debut as a politician. “Hey, I’m president!”

Still, the victory was likely to be a fleeting one; the measure in its current form has little chance of advancement in the Senate, where its steep Medicaid cuts and provisions to scale back health benefits are being met with skepticism from members of both parties.

“We’re going to get this finished,” Mr. Trump said, before moving on to “the biggest tax cut in our nation’s history.”

“We’re going to have a tremendous eight years,” he proclaimed.

Despite the passage of the bill in the House, the Affordable Care Act will remain in place — at least for now.

The repeal bill is not likely to be met with great celebration in the Senate.

Yes, Republican senators share their House colleagues’ desire to repeal major parts of the Obama-era health law.

But they may not agree on exactly which parts.

Already, Republicans in the Senate have aired a variety of concerns about the House plan, including how it would affect states that expanded Medicaid under the health law and whether it would raise premiums to unaffordable levels for older Americans.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, made it clear his chamber would take its time. “The Senate will now finish work on our bill, but will take the time to get it right,” he wrote.

In other words, expect to see plenty of changes to the House bill — and, in the long run, plenty more fits and starts.

The president may make sure the Affordable Care Act collapses — and he’s got the power to do it.

Even as he boasted of the benefits the Republican health care plan will have for Americans, Mr. Trump on Thursday again raised the specter that his administration might not continue providing subsidies that are paid to insurance companies so they can reduce deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for millions of low-income consumers.

“It’s obvious that it’s failing — it’s dead,” Mr. Trump said of the Affordable Care Act. “If we don’t pay lots of ransom money over the insurance companies, it would die immediately.”

The Trump administration had initially suggested to Democrats that it would do just that, part of an effort to force them to the negotiating table to bargain with him. But in talks last week on a spending package to fund the government through September, White House officials committed to continuing the subsidies.

On Tuesday, the White House indicated that that position could soon change; Mick Mulvaney, Mr. Trump’s budget director, said no decisions have been made beyond the month of May.

Get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the Morning Briefing newsletter.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT