House Freedom Caucus co-founder Rep. Jim Jordan tried Sunday to end the blame being cast upon his group and others for Republicans’ failed ObamaCare overhaul bill
Chis Wallace tried to get him to admit that he was trying to take away protections for people with pre-existing conditions but Jordan would only say he was trying to make health insurance affordable.
Who Stopped the Republican Health Bill?
33 Republicans who would not budge from their decisions to vote “no” on the health care bill were key to causing its collapse. They can be divided into three broad categories:
15 Hard-liners
10 Moderates
8 Other Republicans
C.B.O Report Leaves Trump in a Political Log Jam on Health Care
“If there was ever a war on seniors, this bill is it,” Schumer said. “It spends more on tax cuts for health-insurance companies and the wealthy than on tax credits to help the middle class.
.. To begin with, the reason the additional measures that Spicer mentioned aren’t included in Ryan’s current proposal is that they would require sixty votes in the Senate to pass.
.. Jim Jordan, the Ohio representative who heads the Freedom Caucus
.. Jordan added that he and his colleagues would offer a series of amendments to the legislation when it comes to the House floor, next week. These are likely to include things like moving up the dismantling of the A.C.A.’s Medicaid expansion from 2020 to 2018, which would only further increase the number of uninsured.
.. If he sticks with the current bill, Trump would be tied to a proposal that would do great harm to many of his supporters and make a mockery of his claims to be a populist.
.. The Trump Administration could, for example, push to take some of this money and make the tax credits in the bill more generous, especially for lower-income people, or preserve at least part of the Medicaid expansion.
.. If the White House preserved some of the taxes imposed by the A.C.A., which fell on people earning more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, it would have even more leeway to come up with a less damaging proposal.
.. Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative news site Newsmax, wrote in a piece published Tuesday that it’s time for Trump to “ditch the Freedom Caucus and the handful of Senate Republicans who want a complete repeal of Obamacare. They don’t agree with universal coverage and will never be placated.”
Paul Ryan’s Health-Care Vise
As with the majority of House Republicans, most members of the Freedom Caucus have only ever served under a Democratic President. They were elected to oppose Obama and everything he stood for and they spent most of his Presidency attacking Republican leaders who they believed thwarted those efforts. They have no experience legislating.
.. An early version of the Ryan plan replaced these subsidies with less generous refundable tax credits, which many conservatives dislike because Americans who pay no taxes would still be eligible for the credits.
.. Ryan’s response was to leave the expansion in place until 2020
.. Proponents of the Medicaid expansion see the deadline as creating a health-insurance time bomb that will detonate in a few years.
.. Health-care reform has long been stymied by the insurance industry. Bill and Hillary Clinton took on the industry in 1994 and were badly defeated. In 2009, Obama decided to buy the industry off by including a provision forcing every American to buy its product—the dreaded individual mandate.
.. Ryan and Trump have insisted they would keep those popular regulations while killing the mandate, which forces the uninsured to pay a tax penalty. Their solution is that the uninsured would pay a penalty to insurance companies. Specifically, insurers would be allowed to charge anyone with a two-month gap in coverage up to a thirty-per-cent surcharge on a new policy. For many Americans, the surcharge in Trumpcare could end up being more than the current tax penalty in Obamacare.
.. When Lyndon Johnson created Medicare he essentially made up and lowballed the long-term costs of the program. Without a true estimate, it was difficult for fiscal conservatives, medical groups, and other opponents to attack the plan, and it sailed through Congress.
.. In 2009, Obama became so frustrated by the C.B.O., whose cost estimates had an enormous impact on the health-care debate, that during an Oval Office meeting he said he didn’t want to hear the C.B.O. mentioned, so his aides referred to it as “banana.”
.. Ryan needed to shape a bill that would survive this process, and as a result, he left out some of conservatives’ most long-standing health-care-policy ideas. (For instance, most conservatives support changing a law that prevents insurance from being sold across state lines, arguing it would make markets more competitive and bring down costs, but Ryan didn’t include the change in his plan.)
.. Ryan has produced a bill that nobody would ever propose as a sane solution to the problems with Obamacare. Its only chance is speed. If Ryan can rush and muscle it through the House and Mitch McConnell can do the same in the Senate, it might end up on Trump’s desk. But the more scrutiny this House bill is subject to, the more likely it is to share the fate of most efforts at health-care reform and die somewhere on its journey to the Senate