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WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday turned up the pressure on recalcitrant Republicans to support a sweeping bill to overhaul the health care system, threatening wavering lawmakers in his party with political payback if they failed to get behind a measure that has become an early test of his negotiating power. In a series of meetings and phone calls at the White House and on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Republican congressional leaders haggled with holdouts over details as they struggled to assemble a majority to support a bill that would repeal and replace the Affordable...

Health Reform: President Trump's visit to Capitol Hill might have been enough to ensure that the House ObamaCare "repeal and replace" bill will get enough votes to pass. If it fails, it will be a disaster for Trump and the GOP. If it passes, it will hardly be a victory. Trump met with House Republicans in a closed-door session to warn them that failure to pass this bill is not an option. According to some lawmakers, he told anyone thinking of voting no that "I'm going to come after you, but I know I won't have to because I know...

House Speaker Paul Ryan agreed Tuesday with PresidentDonald Trump that Republicans risk losing control of Congress if they don't unify this week to force passage of the leading bill to replace key parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ryan said he disagreed with the notion that there are not enough votes to pass that bill on Thursday. "Yes, absolutely," Ryan said when asked if he agreed with Trump's personal admonition to GOP House members during a visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday that "many" of them would lose their seats if they voted against the bill. "The president of the...

Remember the date of March 13, 2017. It was the day President Trump was guaranteed his re-election and Republican congressional gains in 2018 and 2020. It's not complicated. Follow along. The Congressional Budget Office released its study of Trump and Paul Ryan's plan to repeal Obamacare and begin to reform our healthcare system. It had many numbers. Only two mattered: taxes and spending. CBO announced that the repeal bill reduces taxes by almost $900 billion and reduces federal spending by $1.2 trillion over the next decade. This reduces deficit spending by $300 billion over the next 10 years. Thus the...

The Republican leadership’s plan to roll back Medicaid puts families with disabilities in a dire situation. Many American families rely upon Medicaid to pay for the expensive care that comes with disabilities. Families with special needs rely upon Medicaid for specialized care for daily living and to pay caretakers so that parents can work. However, the Ryan plan might jeopardize those who rely upon Medicaid for disabilities. Speaker Ryan’s plan places a per-person cap for all Americans, including people with disabilities, children, and the elderly. Conservatives previously advocated for block granting Medicaid to the states, where states can have more...

President Donald Trump told reporters that a “big fat beautiful negotiation” was underway on the proposed house health care bill, after a growing number of conservatives have voiced dissent with the effort. “We’re negotiating with everybody,” Trump said. “It’s a big fat beautiful negotiation and hopefully we’ll come up with something that’s going to be really terrific.” Trump made his remarks during a meeting with his cabinet at the White House — although four of them have yet to be confirmed by the Senate. During remarks to reporters, Trump thanked Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for working “around...

The CBO has released its estimated cost of the new GOP health care plan and the numbers are getting some bad spin from the usual suspects. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Monday projected that the number of people without health insurance would grow by 14 million in 2018 under the Republican ­ObamaCare replacement bill, with that number rising to 24 million in a decade. The Hill described the report as a "bombshell."The Washington Post called it "cruel."The New York Times said Republicans were anticipating an "almost certain to be a bleak accounting" of the plan.The implicit standard in...

The failed rollout of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s unpopular healthcare bill has weakened his hold on the Speakership, and could cause his replacement, says David Frum, a GOP-leaning author, a champion for pro-American immigration and labor policies, and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. The prediction came in an evening Tweet from Frum, who is now a columnist for The Atlantic magazine. I don’t believe Trump is strategic enough to have planned this, but the way is now clear for Ryan to be shoved aside for a Trumpist Speaker — David Frum (@davidfrum) March 13, 2017 Growing GOP...

The structure and character of the federal government is largely the creation of Democrats. From Woodrow Wilson to FDR to LBJ to Barack Hussein Obama, every time progressive Democrats seize the presidency and Congress, they expand the size and scope of the central government. When Republicans recapture power, they are either unable or unwilling to roll back the Dems’ expansions. And so, the New Deal, the Great Society, and quite likely ObamaCare become permanent parts of government, and the Leviathan continues to grow. Although Republicans have promised for years to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare, since the March 7 unveiling of...

The much-maligned Obamacare replacement bill will face its biggest test so far on Thursday, as a House of Representatives committee filled with conservatives could derail the legislation backed by Speaker Paul Ryan before it gets to the House floor. If four Republicans join Democrats in voting against the bill in the House Budget Committee, the legislation will fail. The uncertainty comes as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its estimate on the bill. It predicted Monday that 24 million people would lose health coverage by 2026 but that there would be a cut to the federal budget deficit of $337...

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Sunday said he agrees with President Trump that 2018 will be a "bloodbath" for Republicans if Congress does not pass legislation repealing and replacing ObamaCare. “I do believe that if we don't keep our word to the people who sent us here, yeah,” Ryan told CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” when asked if he agreed with Trump’s reported comments about the 2018 midterm elections.

President Donald Trump has more than the Democratic opposition to worry about with his proposed American Health Care Act. Conservatives are pushing hard against it, too, despite AHCA proponents' attempts to persuade members of the House Freedom Caucus with an ad campaign and some schmoozing in Washington. "Right now, I think there is a charm offensive going on," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told CBS host John Dickerson on Sunday's "Face the Nation." "Everybody is being nice to everybody, because they want us to vote for this, but we are not going to vote for it." Conservatives will fight President Trump's...

Congressman Louie Gohmert (98% CR) (Badass constitutional conservative – TX), appearing on Fox & Friends Saturday morning, reminded America that the House and Senate with Republican majorities, already passed a full of repeal of Obamacare and sent it to Obama’s desk in 2015, and that bill met the requirements of the so-called “Byrd rule,” which allowed for its passage through the budget reconciliation process — meaning that a full repeal of Obamacare could again pass the Senate with only 51 votes and be sent to President Trump’s desk (Obama, of course, repealed the 2015 bill). “We did a more complete...

President Trump has told Republican leaders that he's prepared to play hardball with congressional conservatives to pass the GOP healthcare bill, including by supporting the 2018 primary challengers of any Republican who votes against the bill. Sources told the Washington Examiner that Trump made that threat in a White House meeting on Tuesday with House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and other members of the House GOP whip team that helps line up votes. Trump's threat is one that could resonate. Most of the Republicans who oppose the GOP's American Health Care Act represent ruby red districts that strongly support...

Dear Mr. President: Do NOT under any circumstances endorse or sign RYANcare. RYANcare will immediately become TRUMPcare and that will destroy your credibility and your presidency. Ryan and the globalist big government GOPe hates you and what you ran on just as much as the democrats and the media. The day you sign TRUMPcare, you own it and they own you. You will be the GOPe's prison bitch. You will also lose your support base and then your tax plan and other trade and economic plans go up in smoke. Do not settle for anything less than full and complete...

We are approaching Obamacare’s seven-year anniversary. During that span, the GOP attempted to cripple, defund, or repeal Obamacare with one thing in mind: using the fear of Obamacare to win elections. Now that they have the ability to actually repeal it, they’ve scrapped all past bills they allegedly supported (including a very popular full repeal bill in 2015) and gave us redistribution of the redistribution they pretended to despise. Let’s be clear about one thing: the American Health Care Act is NOT a repeal of Obamacare. To say it repeals Obamacare is like saying they’re getting rid of a cheeseburger...

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was chief lobbyist for the Republican Obamacare replacement bill Thursday, but conservatives and moderates in the Senate were indicating that their votes may not be there. Ryan spent his weekly press conference giving a lengthy professorial lecture on the basics and benefits of the American Health Care Act, assisted by visual aids. "We are going to repeal and replace Obamacare and we're going to do it with a three-pronged approach. Number one is what we're talking about right now... that's called reconciliation. That's the American Health Care Act. There are only so many...

House Speaker Paul Ryan is openly targeting House Republicans with television advertisements—while conspicuously not hitting Democratic members—to try to browbeat them into supporting his healthcare legislation. The ad then cuts to President Trump’s recent address to a joint session of Congress, where Trump says he wants to “repeal and replace Obamacare.”

The text of Republican health care reform bill to replace Obamacare was released Monday night. Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump offered a full-throated endorsement of the legislation put forward by House Republican leadership. The bill is “out for review,” President Trump tweeted. Well, the CR review is in, and the bill is terrible. For the last six years, the primary complaints of Republicans against Obamacare were the unconstitutional individual mandate and the insurance regulations that are driving up the cost of premiums. Neither of those problems are addressed in the RINOcare bill. A Republican version of the individual mandate remains...

When Paul Ryan and his congressional clown car of alleged conservatives surprised us by just sort of dropping Obamacare Jr. on us, I wasn’t surprised to see them trip all over their Guccis during the utterly inept roll out. These nimrods couldn’t effectively communicate to Elizabeth Warren with smoke signals. But even I was shocked at how transcendently crappy their proposed Obamacare replacement is. Let me put it this way: the only thing that steaming pile of failure would be good for is as the key prop in a very specialized, niche German porno film. Seriously, how many times do...