Speaker Paul Ryan is confident the American Health Care Act will pass the House this week, and he sent a veiled message to skeptical Republicans: If the bill fails, they’ll have to answer to their voters.
Ryan said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show he’s feeling good about the bill’s chances, but he didn’t break down a whip count on how many votes he thinks he can get to pass it. It’s up in the air whether enough conservative members of the House will vote with Democrats to kill the bill. A vote is expected Thursday.
Ryan said he feels good because he thinks the bill is good policy, it has the backing of President Trump, and it delivers on the major campaign promise of repealing the Affordable Care Act.
“We made a promise, we’ve got to keep a promise,” he said. “Everyone knows this is the one real opportunity to repeal this law … this is the one chance we have to actually repeal Obamacare and replace it with the stuff we believe in.”
If it goes down, Ryan said, there’s going to be some awkward meetings with voters back home. That’s why he thinks skeptical conservatives will get on board.
“People will realize I’m not going to go home and face voters after reneging on my word,” he said.
While the bill isn’t everything many conservatives want, Ryan said there’s a way to get those provisions in the final bill that goes before Trump.
He said including ideas that are popular among conservative lawmakers in the House in the bill that passes the lower chamber would kill it the moment it arrives in the Senate. However, leaving those provisions out would allow conservative senators to add them into the bill during the amendment process in the Senate.
After the Senate passes the bill, then it would go to a reconciliation process and the conference committee that negotiates the final bill could include those priorities, he said.
“We want to beta test these ideas in the senate,” he said. “We want our senators to introduce the ideas we like and see if we can get them past what we call the Byrd rule, this reconciliation rule.”
“We can’t move things that are fatal to the bill even being considered in the Senate,” he said.
Ryan added that he thinks it would be an immoral move to follow suggestions from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Trump to allow Obamacare to collapse completely. Graham and Trump have both suggested letting the entire system collapse, blaming the Democrats for it and then forcing them to work with Republicans to pass a new system.
“I just don’t think that’s the right course for a lot of reasons,” Ryan said.
