#paul ryan
Trump says he’ll keep Obamacare if the awful GOP bill isn’t passed. It’s a disgusting slap in the face to his conservative supporters.
Written by Kyle Chaney, et. al, for Politico:
President Donald Trump’s ultimatum to Republicans to overturn the Democratic health care law they’ve been campaigning against for years heads to the House floor Friday for a momentous showdown that will test the GOP’s ability to govern.
And no one, not even the people in charge of counting the votes, can say what will happen.
Top House leaders, squeezed by hardline conservatives and skittish moderates, privately worry that too many Republican lawmakers have publicly panned the health care proposal they crafted, making them less susceptible to last-minute arm-twisting and a pressure campaign from the White House. But they also saw signs that the resistance has begun to weaken in the face of Trump’s Thursday night ultimatum: pass my bill or leave Obamacare in place. …
Asked Friday morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America” if the White House and GOP leadership-backed bill has enough votes to pass, Mulvaney, himself a former Freedom Caucus member, said “don’t know.”
Rand Paul knows of at least 35 Republicans who plan on voting against the Obamacare Lite bill. Just 21 “No” votes kill the bill.
Written by Matthew Boyle for Breitbart:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News exclusively on Tuesday afternoon that he expects House Speaker Paul Ryan will be forced to pull the American Health Care Act (AHCA) before a scheduled Thursday vote because Ryan will not get the votes to pass the legislation.
The AHCA has been dubbed “Obamacare Lite” by Paul — a leading conservative critic of the plan — and by other conservatives as “RyanCare,” “RINO-Care,” and “Obamacare 2.0,” since the bill does not actually fully repeal Obamacare and keeps many of the main structures that the now-former President Barack Obama installed in the healthcare system. It has come under intense scrutiny from both sides of the Republican Party — moderates and conservatives are lining up against the bill — and Ryan, despite publicly projecting confidence, cannot find the necessary 216 votes to pass the legislation. …
If you keep all the insurance mandates, and you keep subsidizing insurance, basically it’s Obamacare Lite. So I think it’s still Obamacare Lite. The modifications, some are going in the right direction, but they actually expanded some of the subsidies. So one of the new things about it is it’s actually $75 billion more in subsidies. So, I think they’re stuck trying to split the baby. They’re trying to give conservatives a few token changes. And they’re trying to give the moderates more subsidies. …
I’m still unclear as to why they completely ignored conservatives early on in the process and then they had the audacity to look at conservatives and say ‘this is what you all campaigned on.’ That just, frankly, was never true. I was elected in 2010 in the big Tea Party wave that was for repealing Obamacare root and branch, rip the whole thing out. We were for repealing it. I still think that our grassroots conservative supporters are for repealing it. But somewhere along the line, Paul Ryan decided that it wasn’t so much about repealing it but about replacing it with Obamacare Lite. And I think that was a tactical error on their part to think ‘oh, we’ll just be for this and everybody will be for this’ when in reality no conservatives are really for the Ryan plan.