The White House is attempting to revive a repeal and replacement of Obamacare, starting with overtures to one of the Republican senators who expressed his opposition to the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act. President Donald Trump will unveil his plans to the gathering of Senate Republicans at a lunch at the White House Wednesday.
Mike Lee, the conservative Utah senator who on Monday announced he would join Kansas senator Jerry Moran in opposing the BCRA, spoke with Vice President Mike Pence at Tuesday’s Senate GOP policy lunch and later that day spoke with Trump on the phone. Both Trump and Pence discussed health care with Lee.
Two former Trump campaign aides, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, also met with Lee in his Capitol Hill office in a conversation that Lee’s spokesman defined as “friendly and productive.” It’s not clear under whose direction or in what capacity the two campaign aides were meeting with Lee, as neither Lewandowksi nor Bossie work in the White House.
A spokesman for Lee says the Utah Republican remains supportive of some kind of Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill that includes a “full” version of what’s been called the consumer freedom amendment. The proposal would allow health insurers to sell plans exempt from Obamacare’s regulations to low-risk customers, so long as they also sell plans in compliance with those regulations. A “tweak” to the amendment that retained an Obamacare requirement that states maintain a single risk pool was supported by Lee ally Ted Cruz, but the changes lost Lee’s support for the whole bill. (THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported on Lee’s dissatisfaction with the Cruz amendment here.)
According to a White House source, the administration is hoping to resuscitate the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, which appeared dead after Lee and Moran joined Rand Paul and Susan Collins in opposing it. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had subsequently raised the option of voting on delayed repeal of the health-care law’s subsidies, delaying the replacement of the law’s regulations at a later date. Three Republican senators—Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Shelley Moore Capito—expressed their opposition to this plan, also seemingly killing that idea.
But according to the White House source, the president will push Senate Republicans to include new replacement language in a repeal bill, and the source expressed confidence Lee would get on board. Whether or not one of the other three senators who opposed the BCRA—Moran, Collins, or Paul—would also support such a bill, or whether additional Republicans might shift their support remains undetermined.
