Quote:Donald Trump Admits His Health Plan Will Hurt His Supporters
“A lot of things aren’t consistent” with his campaign message, he told Tucker Carlson.
Maybe you'll take The Donald's word on the matter.....even though it's clear he doesn't even understand Ryan's Bill..
by Tina Nguyen,
March 16, 2017 11:52 am
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/donald...-americans
By Michael Reynolds/Pool/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
At the moment, Paul Ryan appears hard-pressed to find anyone who particularly likes his current plan to replace Obamacare, which would slash Medicaid and federal support to help people afford private insurance—though by not enough for some Republicans, and by far too much for others.
Several independent analyses, including one by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, have found that the House G.O.P. bill would cause the number of people without health insurance coverage to increase by as much as 26 million over the next ten years.
Even Donald Trump, who has largely adopted Ryan’s proposal, despite acknowledging that he didn’t know “health care could be so complicated“, is signaling reservations about the whole endeavor.
Faced with growing discontent within his own party—including the fever swamps of Breitbart, where the president’s most ardent fans can’t decide whether “Ryancare” is “Obamacare 2.0” or doesn’t cover enough people, two positions that appear to be in conflict—Trump scrambled onto Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show on Wednesday night to defend his approach and, perhaps accidentally, display a rare bit of humility.
Asked whether the current G.O.P. bill would hurt his constituents, Trump acknowledged that “a lot of things aren’t consistent” between the Republican plan and his message during the transition, when he promised to provide “insurance for everybody.”
But, he told Carlson, “these are going to be negotiated. We’ve got to go to the Senate. We’re going to see what happens in the Senate. Now right now, we have five or six senators that look like maybe they’re not going to—I’m talking about Republicans, because we’re not going to get one Democrat to vote for it.”
Trump’s admission that the current House G.OP. bill is “preliminary” is the latest in a series of contradictory remarks and positions over the past few days.
Earlier this week, Trump promised a group of conservative activists that he’s open to major changes to the bill, while White House adviser Kellyanne Conway separately insisted to a different group of stakeholders that the bill was almost in its final form.
The horse-trading appeared to accelerate on Wednesday, as Republicans continued to litigate the bill’s details in back rooms and in the press, but it remains unclear whether it is possible for any final product to pass both the more conservative House and the comparatively moderate Senate.
Complicating matters further is Trump himself, who once again threw a wrench into the proceedings when he told Carlson that he wouldn’t accept legislation that hurt the American public—the same promise he made on the campaign trail and promptly broke when he helped Ryan outline his bill. “If we’re not going to take care of the people, I’m not signing anything,” he said.
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