House Republican leaders say they have no plans to try to repeal Obamacare again anytime soon and are moving on to tax reform instead.
“Now we are going to move forward with the rest of our agenda,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a news conference Friday afternoon.
The Wisconsin Republican has said since the 115th Congress opened that tax reform was the second big-ticket item on the GOP’s agenda.
“We’ve been running a parallel track just full steam and now this allows us to devote all of our energy to this,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said shortly after President Trump ordered Ryan to pull the bill from the House Friday afternoon because too many conservative and moderate members opposed it.
“We’re discussing all the elements” of the GOP plan to overhaul the tax code, he said.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who was willing to vote for the compromise plan hammered out by Trump and Ryan, said the GOP has plenty of priorities besides healthcare.
“There’s so many issues that we have to work on and so many promises that president has made that we need to work on, and we’ll work on some of those,” he said. But, “I don’t know what the agenda is going to be for the next two weeks.”
When asked if next week’s schedule would focus on healthcare, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, who is vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, said Trump pulled the plug.
“Nope, we’re done,” he told the Washington Examiner. “As far as we’ve been told, the president and everybody else said this is our chance and we’re moving on. When you don’t have the votes, you don’t have the votes, and he understands that.”
Still, several lawmakers think Republicans shouldn’t give up on repealing Obamacare just yet.
“I think we’re going to have to come back to it,” Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama said told reporters. “I don’t think it’s going to be a couple of years. I think it’s going to be a lot quicker than that because the circumstances on the ground are going to deteriorate so badly we’re going to have to do something.”
He admitted that Friday’s events make it harder for Republicans to advance the rest of their agenda, such as tax reform.
“There’s not an easy path to do tax reform ever,” he said. “It’s a hard thing to do. Does this make it more difficult? Yes it does.”
Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., a moderate who opposed the American Health Care Act, agreed that lawmakers need to revisit Obamacare.
“I think it’s important now that we start over and do a durable, sustainable healthcare bill in a bipartisan way,” Dent said. “I think that’s what we have to do now.”
For now, Republicans will have to look to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price to roll back pieces of the Affordable Care Act. Although they admit they just made his job harder.
“It increases the amount of work that he needs to do,” said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas. “He is a good man and I expect him to take up the challenge.”
Since the American Health Care Act was introduced this month, Republicans have said the legislation is the first phase in a three-phase process. The second is rolling back some of Obamacare through regulations, and the third is future legislation.
Now that it’s evident that Republican leaders cannot move forward legislatively, Price will have to secure any “win” the GOP may get on rolling back Obamacare.
Price can use regulations to weaken the law or provide states more flexibility. The Affordable Care Act gives the HHS secretary wide latitude in several key areas.
For instance, states that want to expand Medicaid through Obamacare can apply for a waiver to include measures such as worker requirements for able-bodied people to apply for the expansion.
Most significant is that Price can set regulations for Obamacare’s exchanges, such as which benefits can be included in plans that are sold on the law’s exchanges. Plus, Price will set how much money is spent on advertising and outreach for Obamacare’s open enrollment period, which is shortened for 2018.
The Trump administration was criticized because it pulled about $5 million of ads near the end of open enrollment for this year.
However, the bulk of Obamacare will remain intact, and that means the law’s exchanges on the individual market, which is for people who don’t have insurance through their job, will remain for the foreseeable future.
It remains to be seen, however, how individual market insurers will take the news. The insurance industry has been waiting to see what happens with repeal, and it has to start submitting plans to be approved by the federal government next month.
Al Weaver contributed to this report.
