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Mike Pence says repealing Obama's healthcare law is 'first order of business' Mike Pence promises Obamacare repeal but shares few details on alternative
(35 minutes later)
Donald Trump has made repealing Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law the “first order of business” and intends a smooth transition to a “market-based” medical insurance system, vice-president-elect Mike Pence said on Wednesday as he visited Republicans on Capitol Hill. Mike Pence urged Republicans on Capitol Hill to unite in condemnation of Obamacare on Wednesday – but offered few clues as to what its replacement will look like.
Simultaneously, Democratic leaders met with Obama to discuss how they could protect the law, and accused Republicans of wanting rip apart the American healthcare system with no plan on how to replace it. As Barack Obama held talks with House and Senate Democrats on Wednesday over how to defend his signature healthcare policy, Donald Trump’s incoming vice-president and House speaker Paul Ryan sought to portray Obamacare as a disaster from which Americans needed immediate “relief”.
Trump and his fellow Republicans who control both houses of the US Congress risk severely disrupting the health insurance market in scuttling the 2010 Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, as well as a political backlash against Republicans. But they also promised not to “pull the rug out from anybody”, implying that some provisions of the Affordable Care Act might remain in place, at least temporarily, for millions of people at risk of losing health insurance.
After Pence’s meeting with congressional Republican leaders, neither the vice-president-elect nor House speaker Paul Ryan offered details on what a Republican-backed replacement for Obamacare would look like. Ryan said lawmakers would take action that did not “pull the rug out from anybody”. Not for the first time, the meeting in Washington was somewhat upstaged by Trump himself, who tweeted that Republicans “must be careful” to ensure that Democrats shoulder the blame for the “failure” of Obamacare. “Don’t let the Schumer clowns out of this web,” he wrote, referring to Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.
Obama met on Wednesday morning with Democratic legislators, including US Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, to discuss how they can protect the law, which was passed by Democrats nearly seven years ago over unified Republican opposition. In another tweet, the president-elect said: “Dems are to blame for the mess. It will fall of its own weight – be careful!”
Obama “encouraged us to fight,” Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings told reporters of the meeting. On Capitol Hill, Pence emerged from the meeting and said Trump, who will be inaugurated on 20 January, would hit the ground running. “We’re going to be in the promise-keeping business,” he told reporters. “It will literally begin on day one. Before the end of the day, we can anticipate that the president-elect will be in the Oval Office taking action, to both repeal executive orders and also set into motion through executive action promises that were made on the campaign trail.”
The law has enabled upward of 20 million Americans who previously had no medical insurance to get coverage and is considered Obama’s top legislative achievement. Republicans, who will control both Congress and the White House in 2017, condemn it as a government overreach. He did not specify whether these executive orders would include changes to the healthcare system but, in New York, Trump’s incoming press secretary Sean Spicer reportedly suggested that they would. The orders would come “within hours of being sworn in”, he was quoted as saying.
“The first order of business is to keep our promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with the kind of healthcare reform that will lower the cost of health insurance without growing the size of government,” Pence said at a news conference. Pence said the administration would keep Trump’s campaign promises to end illegal immigration, build a wall along the Mexican border and rebuild the US military. “But the first order of business is to repeal and replace Obamacare ... The American people voted decisively for a better future for healthcare in this country and we are determined to give them that.”
Pence said it must be done in a way that does not “work a hardship” on the economy or Americans who gained insurance through Obamacare. Pence, a former six-term congressman, had been on Capitol Hill when Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, he added. “I remember all those promises. We were told if you like your doctor, you can keep him: not true. We were told if you like your health insurance, you can keep it: not true. We were told the cost of health insurance would go down: not true.”
Pence said Trump, who takes office 20 January, will work in concert with congressional leaders for a “legislative and executive action agenda for an orderly and smooth transition to a market-based healthcare reform system”. He added: “The American people have sent new leadership here because Obamacare has failed. It has been rejected by the American people.”
Ryan said Republicans have a plan and “plenty of ideas” to replace Obamacare but offered few specifics. Democrats are hoping to exploit Republican divisions over how to replace the health law.
Trump had said earlier on Twitter that Republicans “must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases”. Democratic leaders cast the debate over the Affordable Care Act as the “first big fight of this new Congress” and warned that repealing the law would throw the entire healthcare system into chaos.
“Don’t let the Schumer clowns out of this web,” he added, referring to Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer. “Republicans will soon learn that you can’t keep the good parts of the ACA and remove the rest of the law and still have it work,” said Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “That’s what they’re struggling with. That’s why they’re not getting anywhere. What they would do would throw the entire insurance marketplace into chaos, plain repeal.”
A third tweet read: “Massive increases of ObamaCare will take place this year and Dems are to blame for the mess. It will fall of its own weight – be careful!” Fresh from a meeting with the president on Capitol Hill to strategize over how best to save his signature legislation, Schumer, standing next to a sign that read “make America sick again” - a slogan several leaders later repeated - said Democrats were united in defending the legislation, which helped drive down the rate of Americans without insurance to historic lows.
Obama walked into a Democratic caucus meeting on Capitol Hill accompanied by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. He ignored a shouted question from a reporter about how to stop repeal of the healthcare law. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called the Republicans’ plan to repeal the law but delay its removal an “act of cowardice” and slammed their other option, “repeal and replace”.
“I think the issue here is the impact on people’s lives,” Democratic Senator Jack Reed said. “Many people don’t really understand that they’re protected by Obamacare.“ Pelosi, who described the meeting with the president as “transformative”, said Obama asked if Democrats were steeled for the fight.
Reed said Democrats will “point out that you are taking the protections away and you have nothing in place”. “He didn’t have to ask us that,” she said.
But the president also encouraged Democrats to be open to Republicans’ ideas on how to improve certain provisions of the law, she said.
Democrats acknowledged that there is little they can do to stop Republicans from repealing the Affordable Care Act, a top priority for the party which has so far failed to bring forward a plan to replace the law. But Pelosi said explicitly that Republicans will need their help to replace the law, and the Democrats at the press conference vowed to make that process difficult.
Democrats are gearing up for an aggressive messaging campaign to try to rally the public around the law, that has helped cover roughly 22 million previously uninsured voters.
“They want to repeal it and then try to hang it on us,” Schumer said. “Not gonna happen.”
Senator Bernie Sanders began his remarks by quoting from one of Trump’s tweets from May 2015 in which the president-elect promised supporters that if he was elected there would be “no cuts” to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
This promise was a “cornerstone”of Trump’s campaign and to renege now would mean one of two things, said the Vermont senator, who campaigned for universal healthcare: “either Donald Trump simply lied to the elderly and the working people of this country”, or he should “come forward, maybe through tweets, one of his tweets, and say clearly that Donald Trump will veto any legislation that cuts Medicare, that cuts Medicaid or that cuts Social Security”.
Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, declined to attend the meeting with the president, explaining that he was dismayed by the partisanship expressed by the dueling visits to Capitol Hill.
“If anyone listened and paid attention to what the American people said when they voted, they want this place to work,” Manchin said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday. The senator said he was interested in working across the aisle to replace, repeal or do “anything that we can” to improve the law, which helped coal miners in his home state obtain health care.
Despite constant criticism from Republicans that the healthcare law is too costly, a new analysis found that a wholesale repeal of the law would cost roughly $350bn over the next decade, according to a new analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group that advocates for fiscal restraint.
But Pence seems determined to make criticism of Obamacare a rallying point, with a PR offensive imminent in a bid to head off Democrats’ own “make America sick again” campaign.
“As the president-elect said today, and as I admonished members of the House Republican confererence today, it’s important that we remind the American people of what they already know about Obamacare, that the promises that were made were all broken, and I expect you’ll see an effort in the days ahead to talk about the facts around Obamacare,” Pence said.
He promised to work with the House and Senate on an “orderly transition to something better” that will not “visit hardship” on American families. With a dig at Obama, he added: “While others are visiting the Capitol today talking about defending failed policies of the past, we are here today speaking to Republican majorities in the House and Senate to advance policies to make America great again.”
Ryan also argued that Obamacare was in urgent need of repair, but sought to quell fears that millions of people would lose heath insurance. He told the press conference: “So much damage has already been done to the country.
“Obamacare is a story of broken promise after broken promise after broken promise, followed by failing programmes, higher premiums, higher deductibles, so we want to make sure that as we give relief to people from Obamacare we do it in a transition that doesn’t pull the rug out from anybody during that transition period. That’s the point that we’re all trying to make.”
Asked for specifics, however, Ryan replied: “We have a plan to replace it. We have plenty of ideas to replace it and you’ll see as the weeks and months unfold what we’re talking about replacing it with: how you can get better choices with lower prices by not having a government taking over our healthcare which is causing all this problem in the first place.”
The law has enabled at least 20 million Americans who previously had no medical insurance to get coverage. Republicans condemn it as government overreach.