WASHINGTON — (CNN/WMAL) President Donald Trump on Friday called for repealing the Affordable Care Act immediately and replacing it later with another health care plan if Republican senators are unable to pass their bill.
If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017
Trump’s declaration — which marks a political shift for him and could further imperil delicate negotiations on Capitol Hill — came shortly after Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, urged the President in a letter to repeal Obamacare now and replace later.
The current Republican plan in Congress is to do both in one massive piece of legislation, though the Senate’s bill has struggled to gain necessary GOP support.
“On July 10, if we don’t have agreement on a combined repeal and replace plan, we should immediately vote again on H.R. 3762, the December 2015 ObamaCare repeal legislation that the Congress passed but President Obama vetoed,” Sasse wrote in the letter. “We should include a year-long implementation delay to give comfort to Americans currently on ObamaCare that a replacement plan will be enacted before expiration.”
A Senate aide told CNN that Sasse’s team and the White House had been privately discussing getting the President to publicly support a straight repeal bill. Once the two sides became confident that Trump was interested, they drafted Sasse’s letter and arranged for him to appear on Fox News Friday morning to call for such a plan.
However, repealing ObamaCare entirely presents nearly impossible political challenges, as it would most likely not fall under the scope of the reconciliation process being used for the current Healthcare bill.
Practically, this process allows Republicans to pass their bill with only 50 votes as long as all the provisions of it are financial or budgetary in nature.
A complete repeal would almost certainly be outside this scope and therefore require 60 votes in the Senate – a non-starter with a unified Democratic caucus determined to protect former President Barrack Obama’s signature domestic legislation.
Trump’s tweet is, however, a new public stance for him regarding health care.
Days after being elected, he told CBS’s Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” that “It’ll be repeal and replace. It will be essentially, simultaneously. It will be various segments, you understand, but will most likely be on the same day or the same week, but probably, the same day, could be the same hour.”
Trump reiterated that position at a news conference as President-elect back in January.
“We’re going to do it simultaneously. It’ll be just fine. We’re not going to have, like, a two-day period and we’re not going to have a two-year period where there’s nothing. It will be repealed and replaced.”
The President’s tweet also could have the effect of further complicating health care negotiations. A GOP official close to leadership and supportive of the current repeal/replace effort told CNN: “Nothing like rolling a hand grenade into ongoing negotiations, eh?”
The concern, the official outlined, is that this now gives conservatives a reason to go back to their corner. While they were hardly at the breakthrough point, there’s no question conservatives, particularly Sen. Ted Cruz, had been working in good faith to get to a deal.
Now the concern is conservatives can just say they wanted the 2015 repeal bill all along, and because the President clearly supports that plan, talks on a sweeping replacement plan can be scrapped.
“We did this dance six months ago. We’ve litigated repeal, delay, replace. Thoroughly. The President spoke against it. This all might be more helpful if we weren’t in the late stages of negotiations,” the aide said.
Appearing on CNN’s “New Day” Friday, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, also rejected the President’s suggestion.
“I think it’s repeal and replace,” he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “We can argue whether they like the system we’re bringing them in or not, but simply a repeal, even with the sunset the year or two down the road — the problem (is) we know how Washington works.”
He explained: “Sometimes on deadlines we still don’t get things done. You can’t leave the American people out like this. This is how sequester happened, because we thought we could fix the problem and never did.”
Meanwhile, the future of the GOP health care efforts remains unclear. Senate Republican leaders scuttled plans for a vote on health care reform earlier this week as GOP leaders criticized the bill, but Trump was optimistic in his outlook Wednesday.
“We’re going to have a big surprise,” Trump said during a brief photo opportunity with reporters as he welcomed the World Series-winning Chicago Cubs at the White House. “We’re going to have a great, great surprise.”
Trump declined to say what the surprise would be, but his optimism contrasted significantly with the nine Republican senators publicly expressing their opposition to the bill the President is championing.
The White House can only afford to lose two of the 52 Republicans in the Senate to pass the legislation.
The-CNN-Wire ™ & © 2017 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company / WMAL.com. All rights reserved. (Photo: CNN)
