Trump punts health care until after 2020

White House

The president’s call to again put Obamacare repeal on the table for Hill Republicans was seen as a potential disaster-in-the making by GOP leaders.

President Donald Trump signaled Monday that congressional Republicans would wait until after the 2020 elections to vote on a GOP replacement for Obamacare — putting off a presumably savage legislative battle on a hot-button campaign issue until after his re-election bid.

“Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesn’t work. Premiums & deductibles are far too high – Really bad HealthCare! Even the Dems want to replace it, but with Medicare for all, which would cause 180 million Americans to lose their beloved private health insurance,” the president tweeted.

Story Continued Below

“The Republicans … are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare,” Trump continued. “In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win … back the House.”

Trump claimed that the as-yet-unseen Republican proposal “will be truly great HealthCare that will work for America,” writing online that “Republicans will always support Pre-Existing Conditions.”

The president’s pledge comes a week after his Justice Department endorsed a federal court ruling to eliminate the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, moving to invalidate the landmark health care law despite objections within Trump’s orbit from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Attorney General William Barr. The judicial ruling had suggested that the Obamacare law, which has passed muster with the Supreme Court, was actually wholly unconstitutional.

The president appeared on Capitol Hill the next day, declaring that the Republican Party “will soon be known as the party of health care.”

Trump’s call to put Obamacare repeal on the table for Hill Republicans — again — was seen as a potential disaster-in-the making by GOP leaders, who knew their incumbents and candidates were hurt by it badly last November. And it was an invitation to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to pound home the issue once again, as she plans to do with a House vote this week.

In public and private, Republican leaders made clear that they didn’t want anything to do with it. They begged Trump to back down, and they made their displeasure known to other administration officials, as well.

GOP leaders even took the position that if Trump wanted to lay out a health-care proposal from his administration, then they were willing to look at it. But Senate Republicans — facing a tough fight to hold onto their majority in 2020 — were pointedly not signing onto any initiative before seeing the plan, giving them room to disavow any Trump proposal if it hurt their own political outlook.

“I look forward to seeing what the president is proposing and what he can work out with the speaker,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a brief interview Thursday, adding, “I am focusing on stopping the ‘Democrats’ Medicare for none’ scheme.” McConnell himself is up for re-election this cycle, as are vulnerable GOP incumbents including Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Cory Gardner (Colo.).

Collins, in fact, doesn’t want the Justice Department to push to strike down the Affordable Care Act, which the department is now doing in federal court.