Several Republican leaders on Sunday formed a political barricade around the health-care bill that narrowly passed the House last week, defending how the legislation would change insurance coverage for people with preexisting illness or injury.
But while House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Trump administration officials rallied around the House legislation after intense criticism from Democrats, who say the bill would strip protections, moderate Senate Republicans were outright dismissive.
“The House bill is not going to come before us,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said on ABC’s “This Week,” adding that the Senate would be “starting from scratch.”
The Republican split-screen on health care revealed the frothing, nerve-inducing debate within the party about how to gut aspects of the Affordable Care Act, which became law in 2010 and whose demise has been a promise by the Republican Party to its conservative base.
A growing number of Senate Republicans are recasting President Trump’s Rose Garden celebration after the House vote as a mere starting point because of anxiety over how the House bill would affect Medicaid recipients in their states, insurance costs for people with conditions such as diabetes or cancer, or the breadth of health benefits in states that would be able to jettison current federal insurance requirements.
Yet Trump and many of his allies continue to doggedly talk up the House bill, resisting the suggestion that the Senate could discard major items in the legislation, which was crafted with inputs from the hard-line House Freedom Caucus.
And many of them remain defiant amid the barrage of attacks from Democrats, who have insisted that the House bill would make acquiring coverage more difficult for people with serious ailments and disrupt insurance markets — and see in the Republicans’ efforts a chance to reclaim the House majority next year.
The seemingly divergent political positioning on display Sunday underscored the fragility of the Republican Party on an issue that has galvanized them for years. Senate Republicans, generally more centrist in their politics, do not feel compelled to herald the House bill. But House Republicans and White House advisers, who are more skittish about fraying the relationships they have cultivated with House conservatives and activists, do not want to shelve or play down the bill that just passed.
Ryan, for instance, offered a spirited defense of the House bill on ABC’s “This Week” as he was peppered with questions about the possibility of sharp premium increases for people with preexisting conditions and the worry that many people on Medicaid will lose their coverage.
Ryan described the House bill as a “rescue operation” meant to address what he characterized as a badly failing Affordable Care Act.
“We will want to make sure people who have bad health-care status, who have a preexisting condition, get affordable coverage,” Ryan said. “That’s not happening in Obamacare. You got to remember, if you can’t even get a health insurance plan, what good is it? You don’t have health insurance.”
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus acknowledged GOP House members could face some criticism but predicted they would ultimately be “rewarded” by voters for having addressed what he described as the failures of the current health-care law.
“Sometimes in life you have to do what’s right, not what’s politically expedient,” Priebus said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”
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SOURCE: Robert Costa and John Wagner
The Washington Post
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