Top White House officials on Sunday said they hope House Republicans will vote on a health care agreement this week, even though House Speaker Paul D. Ryan reportedly told members they should focus in the coming days on keeping the government funded.
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said a recent proposal designed to let states waive insurer regulations in Obamacare is a tweak to an underlying replacement plan, so it’s not as if House Republicans are starting from scratch.
“We don’t think there’s any structural reason that the House and the Senate cannot do both things in a week,” Mr. Mulvaney told “Fox News Sunday.” “If we can have an agreement by the end of the day today on keeping the government open, that can get done this week. And if the House at least can get its ducks in a row to vote this week on health care that can get done as well.”
It was unclear how lawmakers could reach an agreement on funding by late Sunday, though Mr. Mulvaney told Fox that negotiations were going on “as we speak.”
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus also pushed for a vote by Saturday — the 100th day of Mr. Trump’s presidency — though said it wasn’t a make-or-break situation.
“I would like to have a vote this week. And I think the leadership knows that we would like to have a vote this week,” Mr. Priebus told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“In the grand scheme of things, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” he added. “So, we’re hopeful for this week. But, again, it’s not something that has to happen in order to define our success.”
For years, GOP lawmakers have said they would swiftly gut Obamacare once they paired control of Congress with a Republican in the White House. Yet their first go-around last month ended in a mess after leaders were unable to muster the votes and had to yank the bill.
Talks around health care have been revived by a plan negotiated by Rep. Tom MacArthur, a New Jersey Republican who chairs the centrist Tuesday Group, and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
The plan would shift to the states the burden of deciding what services insurers must cover, and would let insurers charge healthy customers less, so long as states set up risk pools to subsidize sicker people priced out of the market.
No state could waive the part of Obamacare requiring insurers to cover people with preexisting medical conditions, however, preserving the most popular part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
It’s unclear whether the proposal can win over enough holdouts to pass. Centrists might not want to let states duck the part of Obamacare that bars insurers from charging sick people more than healthy ones, since they had promised to preserve the provision.
Mr. Ryan has refused to set “artificial deadlines” for a roll call on any new plan. He says it will be held when leaders are confident they’ve whipped enough votes for it to pass.
Rep. Mark Sanford on Sunday argued the emerging proposal could deliver the breakthrough that Republicans need.
The proposal, he said, would let states like Vermont pursue a bigger government role in health care and let his own state execute a more “market-based” system.
“I think it’s something that makes sense,” Mr. Sanford, South Carolina Republican and a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Mr. Trump, who is desperate for a legislative win, recently said the health bill is getting “better and better” each day.
“The quote, ’better,’ that he’s talking about are these very negotiations,” Mr. Sanford said of the waiver plan.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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