The House Republican health care bill has an odd problem: Nobody seems to support it. Nobody, that is, except President Trump and his administration. While the House plan appears to be the work of Speaker Paul Ryan and the two committee chairmen of Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce, the White House has taken ownership of it as well.
It’s the Administration’s Bill, Too
In his Tuesday briefing, press secretary Sean Spicer referred to it as “our bill.” Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price made a guest appearance at the briefing to defend the bill. Yes, Price referred to the bill as currently written as a “starting point” and emphasized the “process” in finding consensus among Republicans. “Nothing focuses the mind like a bill that’s currently on the table,” he said, as a way to suggest the details could be debated and changed and hammered out.
But make no mistake. This is the bill the White House wants to pass and sign. And while Spicer claimed that doing so would constitute a full repeal of Obamacare, the proposal is closer to a tinkering with the current law than Republicans will admit or conservatives would have hoped.
That’s more in line with President Trump’s own position on health care, such as it can be discerned. But what’s remarkable is how few in his own party or within the broader conservative movement are showing any enthusiasm for it.
Dead on Arrival?
Conservative groups like Heritage Action and the Club for Growth made statements of strong disapproval to the bill on Tuesday. A number of the House’s most conservative members, and a few Republican senators (Rand Paul and Mike Lee chief among them) are expressing everything from deep skepticism to outright opposition. With margins as thin as they are in both houses of Congress, Republicans can’t afford to lose more than 21 House members and 4 senators. And they may already be past that.
Meanwhile, intellectuals who have opposed Obamacare have been harsh on the replacement. Health-care policy experts, like the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, Forbes’s Avik Roy, Chris Jacobs of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and former industry insider Bob Laszewski, have offered detailed assessments of the bill that are partially or entirely negative. The editors at National Review call it a “disappointing start.” Megan McArdle says the plan is “worse than Obamacare.” Philip Klein writes that it’s an admission by Republicans that on health care, liberalism has already won. Among serious conservative media, perhaps only the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has offered a positive opinion of the proposal—and even then, the editors admit it “isn’t perfect.”
This is a long way of demonstrating the bill is about as close to dead on arrival as it can get, which is what makes the White House’s early embrace of it so odd. Also odd? On Wednesday evening, President Trump will meet with “conservative leaders” at the White House to discuss health care. This is the sort of meeting that might have been more useful—for reasons of policy and messaging—before the release of the House bill.
Tensions in East Asia Testing Trump’s National Security Team
With North Korea’s provocation in the Sea of Japan, the Trump administration has deployed its THAAD anti-ballistic-missile system to the region. The move has calmed allies but angered China. The New York Times reports all of this is “testing” the Trump national security team. Here’s an excerpt:
Song of the Day
“Higher Ground,”– Stevie Wonder
