President Donald Trump went back to signaling support for a bipartisan plant to send two years of subsidies to insurance companies – after praising it, withdrawing support, then praising it again.
‘I respect very much the two senators you’re talking about,’ Trump said, when asked in the Oval Office about an effort by GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray.
‘I love that they’re working on it. I want them to be careful with respect to the insurance companies. Insurance companies are extremely good at making money, extremely talented at making money. And I want them to be careful with that,’ the president warned.
The president’s ‘love’ for the effort came just a day after he undermined it with a tweet, where he wrote: ‘I can never support bailing out ins co’s who have made a fortune w/ O’Care.’
‘I love that they’re working on it,’ President Donald Trump said of two senators working on a bill to provide subsidies to insurance companies
That tweet came after a public indication of support, and a confirmation that the White House had been aware of and supportive of the negotiating effort.
In his latest posture, Trump on Thursday described the two-year plan as a bridge to a failed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. He spoke only in the most general terms about the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.
‘The block grant, the concept of blocking it out, block grants to the states, that’s what people want. And that’s what the states want,’ Trump said, though the latest GOP effort failed to get a majority in the Senate and drew low approval ratings.
‘And that’s especially what the well-run states want. Because they will have healthcare that’s so good, far better than anybody’s ever even thought,’ the president said.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Governor Ricardo Rossello of Puerto Rico during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on October 19, 2017 in Washington, D.C. He talked up a bipartisan health bill during a question period
A Washington Post average of polls around the time the first repeal effort collapsed in July found on average just 22 per cent of Americans supported it while a 55 per cent majority was opposed.
Trump cast the bipartisan effort as a ‘solution.’ It restores on a two-year basis payments to insurance firms meant to compensate them for covering low-income people under Obamacare. Trump announced last week he was ending such payments.
‘We will probably like a very short-term solution until we hit the block grants, until that all kicks in. In other words, it doesn’t just kick in the following day. There’s a transition period. And if they can do something like that, I’m open to it,’ he said.
‘But I don’t want it to be at the expense of the people. I want to take care of our people. I don’t want to take care of our insurance companies. They’ve been very well taken care of over the last number of years, believe me,’ Trump said.
Asked about the bipartisan effort, Trump said: ‘No, I like people working on plans at all time[s]. I think ultimately block grants is the way to go, where we block out the money to the states. You’ll get better health care. You’ll get it for less money. It’ll be more specific,’ he said.
BLOCKING AND TACKLING: ‘The block grant, the concept of blocking it out, block grants to the states, that’s what people want,’ Trump said
‘Various states really wanted that block grant money. And for the most part, I think we have the vote for that,’ the president argued.
‘There will be a transition period. So anything they’re working on will be short term. It’ll be absolutely short term. Because ultimately, we will be – it’s going to be repeal and replace.’
The effort puts the president between conservative who don’t want to back anything that smacks of boosting Obamacare, and insurance firms demanding payments that were included in the law to subsidize the costs of providing care to low-income people.
The president tried to negotiate the terrain by praising the senators personally.
‘So I have great respect, as you know, for both of the senators you mentioned. And if they can come up with a short-term solution. What i did say, though, is I don’t want the insurance companies making any more money because – than they have to, because you look at the stock prices of the insurance prices from the time of the creation of Obamacare, with 300 per cent and 400 per cent and even more than that, increases in their stock.’
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, U.S., October 19, 2017
‘They made a fortune off Obamacare,’ he complained. ‘The people that need Obamacare are decimated. Premiums are up 40, 50, 60, in some cases over 100 per cent.’
‘So anything that they’re working on is a very short term. Meaning one year to two years max. Because I think we have the votes, or we’re certainly within one vote,’ he said.
Less than a day after Trump threw his weight behind a bipartisan stopgap measure aimed at stabilizing medical insurance markets, he pulled the rug out from under the pair of U.S. senators who unveiled the plan.
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander said Wednesday morning during an Axios event that ‘Trump completely engineered the plan that we announced yesterday’ by repeatedly phoning him – and asking Democratic Sen. Patty Murray to sign on. ‘He wanted a bipartisan bill for the short term.’
But minutes later Trump tweeted what amounted to a statement that he was backing out of supporting what emerged from the legislative sausage-making process.
‘I am supportive of Lamar as a person & also of the process, but I can never support bailing out ins co’s who have made a fortune w/ O’Care,’ the president wrote.
Donald Trump s no longer backing a bipartisan short-ternm Obamacare fix, less than a day after he said it was a good idea
Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray and Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander proposed a short-term Obamacare fix which would have undone Trump’s decision from last Thursday to cut off subsidies to insurance companies
FLIP-FLOP: Trump backed the proposal on Tuesday but quickly changed course, tweeting about his lack of support on Wednesday
Trump seemed to agree with the proposal on Tuesday. He suggested that he was willing to let Congress undo a decision he had been boasting about since last Thursday.
The president bragged at the White House that he had ended ‘hundreds of millions of dollars a month’ in Obamacare-related subsidies to medical insurance companies.
The proposal from Alexander and Murray, which Trump himself apparently arbitrated, would have restored the payments.
By Wednesday morning Trump was backtracking, saying at a meeting at the White House with the Senate Finance Committee that he’s not looking to ‘enrich the insurance companies.’
‘If something can happen, that’s fine,’ Trump said, ‘but I won’t do anything to enrich the insurance the insurance companies, cause right now the insurance companies are being enriched by Obamacare like nothing anybody’s ever seen before.’
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed during her daily press briefing that Trump was changing his position. She told a reporter asking if Trump was saying today that he cannot support the legislation the way it is written that the interpretation was apt.
‘Correct. I think he stated that pretty clearly today,’ she said Wednesday.
Huckabee Sanders said Trump wants a bill that addresses premiums, provides greater flexibility, increases competition, and provides funding through block grants to the states.
‘We’ve said all along that we want something that doesn’t just bail out the insurance companies, that actually provides relief for all Americans,’ she said. ‘This bill doesn’t address that fact. So we want to make sure that that’s taken care of.’
The bill is ‘a good step in the right direction’ and the president is supportive of a bipartisan plan. ‘But it’s not a full approach, and we need something to go a little bit further than that,’ she said during her daily news conference.
Trump showed his first sign of flip-flopping on Tuesday night, saying at a Heritage Foundation dinner that he commended the bipartisan effort but continues ‘to believe that Congress must find a solution to the Obamacare mess instead of providing bailouts to insurance companies.’
Hours earlier he had said that while he favors a long term Obamacare repeal-and-replace solution, the nation would need the Alexander-Murray bill to ‘get us over this intermediate hump’ and prevent insurance markets from collapsing.
The legislation would only be in effect for only two years, but would restore the payments that Trump ended just days ago. It would also states some added flexibility in which kinds of insurance policies are Obamacare-compliant.
‘It is a short term solution so that we don’t have this very dangerous little period,’ he said Tuesday, ‘including a dangerous period for insurance companies’ – the same corporate titans that he blasted in the press conference’s opening minutes.
NOT MY FAULT: Trump tweeted Tuesday evening that insurance premium spikes were the ‘fault of the Democrats’
The Senate deal that Trump turned against on Wednesday would have bridged the gap between Obamacare and a new system of state block-grants
‘If you look at insurance companies and take a good strong look at the numbers, you will see since the formation of Obamacare, they are up 400 per cent, 450 per cent, 250 per cent, 300 per cent. They’ve made a fortune,’ Trump said
‘Obamacare is everything but dead. The people aren’t gonna take it,’ he added.
And the Alexander-Murray bill would ‘not only save money but give people much better health care with a very, very much smaller premium spike.’
In signaling support, Trump said his administration had been involved in talks as the plan was hammered out. Alexander presented the proposal to colleagues at a Republican conference meeting in the Capitol on Tuesday.
Even if Trump had formally backed the final product, it would still have had to make it over a series of hurdles in Congress.
It would be subject to a filibuster in a Senate chamber where many Republicans are strongly opposed to Obamacare and have tried and failed repeatedly to repeal it – something Trump also supports.
In the House, a deal that appeared to be saving Obamacare could draw strong conservative opposition, in a chamber where more than 60 Republicans voted against a recent hurricane relief bill.
The insurance industry, a major player in Washington, can be expected to back it.
On Tuesday Trump pronounced the Obamacare system ‘virtually dead,’ ‘a disgrace to our nation’ and on its ‘last legs.’
‘We are solving the problem,’ he added.
He had boasted Monday of ending the payments, saying during a cabinet meeting that ‘I cut off the gravy train.’
Trump told members of Heritage’s president’s club Tuesday evening that he would eventually get rid of the ‘disaster known as Obamacare’ altogether.
Claiming once more that he expected Republican lawmakers to send a repeal and replace bill to his desk on Jan. 20, his first day in office, Trump said it was ‘not as easy as we thought.’
‘But we’re gonna get it done, you watch,’ he asserted.