by WorldTribune Staff, March 26, 2017
While outsourcing much of the GOP’s failed Obamacare replacement to House Speaker Paul Ryan didn’t work out well, President Donald Trump remains optimistic that a deal on health care will get done.
“ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE,” the president tweeted on March 25. “Do not worry!”
Trump, who was unable to bring together the Republican Party’s various factions, including the conservative Freedom Caucus that ultimately sunk the deal, told The New York Times that last week’s defeat is a minor bump in the road and that the White House will recover.
There are “a lot of players, a lot of players with a very different mind-set,” Trump said. “You have liberals, even within the Republican Party. You have the conservative players.”
Trump’s comments “were outstanding as he showed enormous humility on the defeat of the Republican replacement bill,” radio host Mark Levin said.
“It was a mistake for Trump to get behind it but he is right that a better bill is going to come out of this.”
Levin added that Democrats “don’t have an answer because they helped cause it. The Democrats have destroyed our healthcare system and they are cheering today because they want to keep it destroyed. It is time for really smart conservative intellectuals and economists to begin to unravel what the left wing intellectuals did with the disastrous Obamacare.”
The Times reported that chief strategist Steve Bannon, according to people familiar with White House discussions, “described Trump’s decision to withdraw the health care bill as a flat-out failure that could inflict serious damage on this presidency — even if Bannon believes Congress, not Trump, deserves much of the blame.”
Bannon and legislative affairs director Marc Short had pushed the president “to insist on a public vote, as a way to identify, shame and pressure ‘no’ voters who were killing their best chance to unravel the health care law,” the report said.
Rep. Tom Cole, Oklahoma Republican and ally of the center-right Tuesday Group, said “it’s really a problem in our own party,” and that’s something Trump will “need to deal with moving forward.”
The Tuesday Group stuck with Trump in the health care battle and earned high praise from the president in the hours after the bill’s defeat.
“I think he did a lot — he met with dozens and dozens of members and made a lot of accommodations — but in the end, there’s a group of people in this party who just won’t say yes,” Cole said. “At some point, I think that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats.”
The Times cited officials close to the negotiating process who said much of the blame for the Obamacare replacement going down in flames lies with White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, “who coordinated initial legislative strategy on the health care bill with Ryan, his close friend and a fellow Wisconsinite.”
“Despite the public displays of unity with the speaker, Trump and his team now regret outsourcing so much of the early drafting to Ryan,” the Times report said.
Republicans “should be listening to the Freedom Caucus who took a principled stand, but instead are attacked,” Levin said. “The Republican’s had 7 years to prepare for this to bring in different factions and address the fundamental problems of Obamacare. The problem is a big chunk of the Republican Party is utopian progressive and many do not want to repeal large parts of Obamacare, including HHS Secretary Tom Price.
“They voted 60 times to repeal but they refused to do it when they control both houses of Congress and the presidency.”
Did Obamacare win or did Ryancare go down in flames? Trump’s take added by World Tribune on
View all posts by World Tribune →