Ryan insists GOP unified on Obamacare repeal and replace

Here are some tweets from Paul and reporters on the scene.

“The draft legislation, which was leaked last week, risks continuing major Obamacare entitlement expansions and delays any reforms”, Walker said in a statement. As he exited a House conference gathering, GOP Rep. Mark Sanford – the author of an alternative Obamacare repeal and replacement bill – told CNN that he could not support the legislation “in its present form”.

The issue has already splintered the GOP, whose conservative and moderate wings disagree on key issues such as providing Americans tax credits to encourage them to buy insurance.

Rather than allow public access, the House Energy & Commerce Committee took the unusual step of allowing its GOP members to view the bill Thursday in a secure room, leaving their smartphones outside, aides said.

Paul’s tweet was quickly followed by House Minority Whip and Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer, who’s evidently leading a charge to find the bill on Capitol Hill and broadcasting the search on Facebook Live.

Predictably, the effort to keep the text a secret backfired.

On one level, Paul’s endgame is fairly obvious: The Kentucky senator wants to sabotage Ryan’s bill because it isn’t conservative enough.

The Kentucky senator proceeded to take the Capitol Hill press corps on a whimsical journey created to paint his own party’s legislative process as a Kafkafesque absurdity.

“We were frequently asked in the run-up to the passage to the Affordable Care Act, ‘Have you read the bill?'” Neal said. “They said, ‘You have the wrong room'”.

Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.), denied that the measure was being hidden. McCarthy wouldn’t say, and so then Hoyer chose to go on a physical search for the bill, with several other House Democrats following his lead.

If the actual bill going to markup is like the draft that went public, then we can expect some popular provisions of the ACA – including requiring all insurers to cover 10 essential benefits, prohibitions on lifetime limits for care, and dependent coverage extending until age 26 – to stay in place.

Paul’s Obamacare Replacement Act legislation has also been introduced in the House by Rep. Mark Sanford of SC; it contains free market-based alternatives to the Affordable Care Act as well as a full repeal of President Obama’s landmark healthcare legislation.

At the same time, some Senate Republicans say the proposal goes too far.

In recent years, with a Democrat in the Oval Office, rank-and-file Republicans felt free to oppose Boehner and Ryan because the legislation passed by the House often served as a symbolic stand or an opening ante in a negotiation that seemed destined to tilt toward Democrats.

Reforming Medicare and Medicaid has been a top priority for Republicans as they seek to bring down costs for the programs.

“That sounds like Obamacare under another name”.

“Everybody’s saying the train’s left the station and it’s coming”, Paul said.

“We talk about (health care) all day every day so we’ve got lots and lots of ideas”.