Weeks of negotiations over American Health
Care Act fail to build a GOP consensus, forcing president to pull legislation
from House vote
By Ben Jacobs and David Smith
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Trump says Democrats,
including Nancy Pelosi, to blame after Republicans pull
House bill meant to
replace Affordable Care Act. Watch video here >>
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Donald Trump suffered a major legislative
reversal on Friday as Republicans were forced to pull their repeal of the
Affordable Care Act from the House floor.
After weeks of contentious negotiations over
the American Health Care Act (AHCA), Republicans had to admit defeat as they
could not gain sufficient support from their own side for the plan to overhaul
US health insurance.
Speaking afterward in the Oval Office, Trump
blamed Democrats for the failure of a bill to repeal the signature achievement
of Barack Obama. “If [Democrats] got together with us, and got us a real
healthcare bill, I’d be totally OK with that. The losers are Nancy Pelosi and
Chuck Schumer, because they own Obamacare. They 100% own it,” he said.
Trump refused to bash the House speaker, Paul
Ryan, but declined to answer a question about policy changes he would like to
see in health reform. Instead, he said he was ready to move on to tax reform,
saying: “We’re probably going to start going very strongly on big tax cuts. Tax
reform that will be next.”
He added: “We all learned a lot. We learned a
lot about loyalty.”
Earlier on Friday, as it became clear that
Republican resistance to the bill was hardening, Ryan went to the White House
to tell Trump in person that he did not have the votes to pass the bill.
The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer,
had insisted the vote would go ahead at 3.30pm ET. “Has the team put everything
out there, have we left everything on the field? Absolutely,” he told reporters
at his daily briefing. “But at the end of the day this isn’t a dictatorship and
we’ve got to expect members to ultimately vote how they will according to what
they think.”
However, Spicer’s imagined 3.30pm deadline
slid by, ignored by Republicans on Capitol Hill, and the first reports emerged
that Trump had asked for the vote to be pulled. Minutes later House
Republicans, short of votes, had withdrawn the health bill.
At a press conference soon afterward, Ryan
admitted: “Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with
growing pains and, well, we’re feeling those growing pains today. I will not
sugarcoat this: this is a disappointing day for us.”
He said “doing big things is hard” and
conceded that after almost a decade of saying no to everything in opposition,
the Republicans had failed to come together and agree on something they have
opposed for seven years. “We are going to be living with Obamacare for the
foreseeable future,” he said.
Ryan said he had recommended the bill be
pulled when he realized the votes were lacking. But he praised Trump’s role in
the negotiations, adding: “The president gave his all in this effort; he’s
really been fantastic. Still, we’ve got to do better and we will.”
Asked how Republican members could now go
back to their constituents having failed to keep their promise, Ryan replied:
“That’s a really good question. I wish I had a better answer for you.”
Separately, a Washington Post reporter
described a call with Trump in which he said the bill would not return any time
soon.
Ryan also conceded that Republicans would now
move on to other priorities – securing the border, rebuilding the military and
tax reform. “Now we’re going on to move on with the rest of our agenda because
we have big, ambitious plans to improve people’s lives in this country.”
Although speculation had grown on Friday
afternoon that the bill would be pulled, the announcement came as a surprise to
Republican members.
An emergency meeting of the House Republican
Caucus was called shortly before the scheduled vote. As it was announced, the
House went to recess, with Democrats shouting in a taunting manner, “Vote,
vote, vote”, daring Republicans to bring the bill up. They did not.
In a short meeting, Ryan announced that the
bill was being pulled from the floor in a terse statement to members.
Many moderates in swing districts were wary
of supporting the legislation, which included major cuts to Medicaid and was
estimated by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office to lead to 24 million
fewer Americans having health insurance over the next 10 years.
Conservatives also objected to the
legislation for keeping too much of the architecture of the Affordable Care Act
(ACA), frequently referred to as Obamacare. Although the Republican leadership
made a major concession to them on Thursday by removing the federal mandate
that health insurance plans cover “essential health benefits” such as maternity
care and mental healthcare, this was not enough to win them over.
What you need to know about the Republican
healthcare plan
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As the Nevada Republican Mark Amodei put it,
the GOP caucus “didn’t spend a lot talking about a unified Republican vision
for what we should do with healthcare in the House”. Paul Gosar, a member of
the hard-right Freedom Caucus, which was instrumental in this setback, pointed
a finger at White House staff.
The result is a major political blow to Paul
Ryan, a healthcare policy specialist who led the effort in pushing the AHCA. It
also leaves Trump in a vulnerable position. The president ran on a platform of
repealing the “disaster” of Obamacare and replacing it with “something
terrific”. However, Trump, author of the Art of the Deal, failed to accomplish
that goal in his first major attempt to negotiate on Capitol Hill.
Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader,
called Friday “a great day for our country”, adding: “What happened on the
floor was a victory for the American people.”
The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer,
said in a statement: “Ultimately, the Trumpcare bill failed because of two
traits that have plagued the Trump presidency since he took office:
incompetence and broken promises. In my life, I have never seen an
administration as incompetent as the one occupying the White House today.
“They can’t write policy that actually makes
sense, they can’t implement the policies they do manage to write, they can’t
get their stories straight, and today we’ve learned that they can’t close a
deal, and they can’t count votes.
“So much for The Art of the Deal.”
Members of the Republican caucus took different
lessons from the failure to even bring the AHCA to the vote.
Louie Gohmert of Texas, an arch-conservative
who was opposed to the bill, pointed fingers at House leadership, which he
implied had left both rank and file and Trump boxed in with no alternative.
“The president didn’t really get involved
until after they created this bill and he was fighting for it,” Gohmert said.
Bradley Byrne, a loyal Republican from
southern Alabama, expressed his readiness to still vote for the AHCA after it
was pulled. He mourned the fact that House Republicans fell just short, in his
opinion. “There were 200 plus ... ready to do whatever it takes and ... with
that group of people we can do a lot,” said Byrne. He didn’t blame anyone for
the setback, praising both Ryan and Trump, who he described as doing a “great
job”.
Republicans wondered whether this doomed any
hope of healthcare reform. Gohmert seemed to sympathize with Trump’s desire to
move on to tax reform, adding: “If I were president, I wouldn’t deal with healthcare
any more, but as a legislator it is a problem and we should pick it back up and
do it right.”
Speaking before the bill was pulled, the
North Carolina congressman Mark Walker, chair of the Republican Study
Committee, told reporters: “I can’t pretend that this is a win for us. I’m sure
our friends on the left, this is a good moment for them. In fact, probably that
champagne that wasn’t popped back in November may be utilized this evening.”