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Ryan: Never mind that whole giving up thing; we're still going to repeal ObamaCare



Maybe all the blowback to Friday's surrender press conference caused him to rethink whether Republicans can really just "move on to the rest of their agenda" and leave ObamaCare in place. Or maybe the whole thing was a rope-a-dope to put pressure on the dopes who saved ObamaCare in the first place. Whatever happened, I guess repeal-and-replace is back on:
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan told Republican donors Monday that he intends to continue pushing for an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system by working “on two tracks” as he also pursues other elements of President Trump’s agenda.
“We are going to keep getting at this thing,” Ryan said three days after intraparty opposition forced him to pull the American Health Care Act after it became clear it did not have enough Republican votes to pass. On an afternoon call with donors to his Team Ryan political organization, he continued: “We’re not going to just all of a sudden abandon health care and move on to the rest. We are going to move on with rest of our agenda, keep that on track, while we work the health-care problem. . . . It’s just that valuable, that important.” Ryan (R-Wis.) did not disclose details of what the next iteration of health-care reform might look like, but he suggested that a plan was being developed in time to brief the donors at a retreat scheduled for Thursday and Friday in Florida. His remarks indicated that Republicans may be trying to regroup more quickly than Ryan had suggested they would on Friday, when he declared Obamacare “the law of the land” for the foreseeable future. “When we’re in Florida, I will lay out the path forward on health care and all the rest of the agenda,” Ryan said in the call Monday, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. “I will explain how it all still works, and how we’re still moving forward on health care with other ideas and plans. So please make sure that if you can come, you come — it will be good to look at what can feasibly get done and where things currently stand. But know this: We are not giving up.”

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There's plenty of time to do this and get it right.

If Ryan is serious about this - and I have no reason to think he isn't - then what happened last week will ultimately be little more than a historical blip. Getting ObamaCare repealed fast was never the imperative, despite the strange insistence by both Trump and Ryan to treat it like it was. The imperative is to get it repealed and replaced in the right way. Maybe I should cut a quick check to the RNC so I can get in on the donor call and find out the details. But there's really only one way this can happen, which is to get every faction of the GOP - both House and Senate - together and hammer out the elements of the replacement that everyone can agree on. The problem, of course, will be the House Freedom Caucus, which doesn't know how to take yes for an answer, even when offered a repeal of all ObamaCare taxes, a massive slowing of the nation's spending trajectory and the conversion of Medicaid to a block grant program that conservatives have wanted for decades. All that was in the AHCA, and it still wasn't good enough for them. So if all parties sit down to explore areas of consensus, can the HFC be trusted this time to keep its word? Or will the make demands, see the demands met, and then make new demands like they did the last time around? Worth noting: It's March 28. This session of Congress has been in place for 89 days, and the White House has been back in Republican hands for 69 of them. Democrats didn't pass ObamaCare until they were already into the second year of their Obama-led supermajority, so anyone who thinks the opportunity to get this right has already come and gone needs to go back and read a little very recent history. There's plenty of time to do this and get it right.

Biggest problem Ryan has to overcome is the complicated nature of Senate reconciliation rules

To my mind, the biggest problem Ryan has to overcome is the complicated nature of Senate reconciliation rules. ObamaCare was passed as a reconciliation bill, even though it took a major abuse of those rules by Harry Reid to make it happen. Nevertheless, because that's how it went down, it can be repealed by reconciliation as well. But only some elements of the replacement can get passed by reconciliation, unless the Senate changes the filibuster rules, which Mitch McConnell is loathe to do. The GOP has said from the start that it could cram some elements of the replacement into the repeal bill and pass it by reconciliation, but that other reforms would have to wait for a separate and much harder-to-pass bill. It was always going to go this way, and that was communicated clearly months ago. Yet a lot of people acted surprised when the whole thing was described as a three-phase process, and they insisted disingenuously on treating the Phase 1 bill as if it was the only part of the process that would ever happen. The notion that Ryan and other "establishment Republicans" never really wanted to repeal ObamaCare is simply the work of cynical, paranoid minds. Of course they want to repeal it. But given the havoc it's wreaked on insurance markets for the past four years, it's not an easy fix to get rid of the law while also repairing the damage and holding as many people harmless as you can. That's the part the "just repeal and don't replace" people don't understand, or don't want to understand. Either way, Ryan's proclamation that this is not over is very good news. I'm sure your confidence in the GOP to do this right is a little less than it was a few weeks ago, and so is mine. But all that matters is what they come up with in the end.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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