GOP leaders try to hold party together on Obamacare repeal

Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas said after the Pence meeting with the conference that no decisions had been made about changing the bill, and that he is still confident leadership will bring it to the floor for a vote next week.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to the rally that the Trump administration has been in talks with Ryan and congressional leaders and it was flooding the media with interviews with administration officials to help advance the plan.

On Wednesday night, Donald Trump told a rally in Nashville, Tennessee: “It’s going to be great”. “I wish we were sending the Senate a comprehensive reform that completely repeals Obamacare and completely replaces it with a healthy, vibrant, competitive and consumer-driven market”.

Kentucky GOP Rep. Andy Barr, who was leaning against the bill, but is now supporting it after the meeting this morning told reporters said “absolutely it helps” that the President was so personally engaged this morning. So we’re doing it a different way, a complex way, it’s fine. “I just can’t fathom us getting it to this stage of the game and not moving it across the finish line”. But even if those changes occur, some say they still would worry this bill is destined to die in the Senate anyway – something Senate Republicans themselves have been predicting will happen.

House Republicans from swing districts aren’t interested in taking a risky vote on legislation that may be dead on arrival in the Senate. Health secretary Tom Price was using phone calls to lobby Republican governors, some of whom – with home-state GOP members of Congress – oppose the bill’s phaseout of Obama’s expansion of Medicaid to 11 million additional lower-income Americans. With Democrats expected to vote as a bloc against the legislation, Republicans can afford to lose only 21 votes to pass the bill through the House. That figure underscored the potential political impact of the party’s next move.

Vice President Mike Pence earlier in the day advocated for the plan behind closed doors with the Republican Study Committee, a large group of House conservatives.

The RSC has been pushing to begin the Medicaid expansion freeze in 2018, rather than 2020 as proposed in the bill, and adding a work requirement to the tax credits proposed for helping low-income individuals purchase insurance.

The leader of the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus – whose members want to curb Medicaid, reduce a new tax credit and eliminate requirements on insurers – said there’s been little give from House leaders. No Republicans voted against the bill when it was considered by two previous committees. The bill next goes to the House Rules Committee, where it could see significant revisions. Gone was the federal government’s oppressive mandate requiring all Americans who do not have health coverage to pay a stiff penalty.

The CBO projected 52 million people would be uninsured by 2026 if the bill became law, compared with 28 million who would not have coverage that year if the law remained unchanged.

Conservatives have criticized the legislation as too similar to Obama’s law.

President Donald Trump, who supports the House Republican health care plan, said in his February 28 joint address to Congress that the federal government should “give our great state governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out”.

The latest government sign-up numbers missed Obama’s target of 13.8 million people for 2017.