Republicans thought they left the Obamacare repeal debacle far in the rearview mirror, but President Trump has suddenly revived it, leaving Republicans scratching their heads about what to do next.
Lawmakers were caught off guard when Trump, in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill last week, urged them to revive their long-dead effort to repeal and replace the Obamacare law with something more affordable. Their earlier efforts to repeal the healthcare law may have cost them the House majority in 2018 and could further hurt their political chances at the ballot box in 2020 if they try again to undo it.
Trump’s appeal to the GOP came after his administration made the sudden decision to side with a Texas federal court ruling that invalidated the Affordable Care Act. The decision could lead to the ultimate gutting of the law by the Supreme Court, which would end the expansion of Medicaid, coverage of pre-existing conditions, bans on lifetime coverage limits, and other popular Obamacare protections.
In the meantime, Trump wants the GOP to advance an Obamacare replacement, which was one of his top 2016 campaign promises.
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“The Republican party will soon be known as the party of healthcare,” Trump told reporters as he strolled into the private GOP meeting.
Lawmakers emerged from the meeting bewildered by the president’s renewed enthusiasm for repealing Obamacare. Congress spent much of 2017 attempting to repeal and replace the law after campaigning on the promise alongside President Trump, but the effort was a politically disastrous failure few lawmakers are eager to repeat.
Aside from smaller reform proposals, such as the formation of association health plans and ideas for lowering the cost of prescription drugs, Republican lawmakers aren’t introducing grand healthcare reform measures to replace Obamacare. Instead, they are standing by for the Trump administration to pitch a plan, as Trump recently promised to do.
“We are waiting with bated breath,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the former majority whip, who helped lead the effort to repeal the law in the Senate in 2017 that ended with the now-infamous thumbs-down from the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
“If somebody has a good idea, I’m all for it,” Cornyn said last week. “But it’s harder than it looks.”
[Opinion: How John Roberts turned the Supreme Court into a legislative body to save Obamacare]
Democrats are seizing on Trump’s decision to fight Obamacare in the courts.
They point out that the law’s protection of coverage for pre-existing conditions and other provisions have become popular with voters and that gutting the law would throw millions off their current healthcare plans or from coverage provided by the expansion of Medicaid.
“All would be ended if the president gets his way,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last week. “We will fight that in Congress, fight that in the courts, and fight that in the court of public opinion.”
Some Republicans have continued to work on healthcare reform proposals after the Obamacare repeal failure. The GOP also points to smaller measures they have advanced that can lower the cost of healthcare without repealing Obamacare. Among those is a Trump administration rule that facilitates the growth of association health plans, which allow small businesses to join together to purchase more affordable health insurance coverage.
[Also read: Hill Republicans to White House on Obamacare repeal: You first]
Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee Chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said his panel and the Finance Committee have begun work on proposals to lower healthcare costs overall.
“Our goal is by June to hopefully have a bill in the HELP committee and a bill in the Finance Committee that represents some significant ways to reduce healthcare costs,” Alexander said.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said he’s “working with Democrats and Republicans on identifying problems we can fix” with Obamacare, such as lowering the cost of prescription drugs, which is a top consumer concern.
“We ought to look for those commonsense solutions,” Johnson said. “I’d rather focus on that than what may or may not happen in the courts.”
Republicans are not talking about repealing Obamacare anymore, but they’re instead looking for ways to fix it, according to Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who speaks regularly to the president.
“He has over and over again said we are going to fix it,” Meadows said. “What I see is different is, we are not trying to repeal Obamacare. It now becomes a court decision. If there is a court decision, can we have a product that does keep parts of Obamacare and try to perfect it and make it better?”
