President Trump told a closed-door meeting of grassroots conservative leaders on Wednesday to expect another, companion healthcare bill to hit the House as early as next week, according to sources present for the meeting.
The new legislation would differ from the plan presently working its way through the House in that it would not proceed through budget reconciliation and would therefore require cloture in the Senate. Because Republicans intend to pass the healthcare bill introduced this week using budgetary procedures, they will only need a simple majority to shepherd it through the Senate, where the new piece of healthcare legislation would need at least 60 votes to survive.
In public, the White House has sought to soothe skeptical Republicans by promising the contentious Obamacare reform plan put forward by GOP leadership on Monday was just the first of three phases that will eventually make up its repeal and replace strategy. The second phase, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, will focus on “regulatory modification,” and the third will involve the introduction of additional legislation at some point in the future.
But conservative leaders who attended the White House’s private meeting on Wednesday said Trump laid out a far more ambitious timeline for Obamacare reform.
Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, said the White House indicated during the meeting that the additional healthcare bill would come “much sooner” than officials had suggested publicly.
“Phase three, from what they were indicating in the meeting yesterday will happen, it seems, very quickly,” Martin told the Washington Examiner. “It seemed like they intended to pass that through the House very soon.”
Another meeting attendee said the president expressed a desire to see the House vote on the second healthcare bill by next week.
“It was classic Trump style. He said phase three they should vote on next week, and everybody in the room knew that was unlikely,” the attendee told the Examiner. “We said to him, ‘look, we’re skeptical you can get to 60 [votes],’ therefore we don’t want to have to have anything major in that third phase.”
The Republican healthcare plan currently under review in House committees has attracted criticism from within the GOP because it leaves intact much of Obamacare’s regulatory structure. A handful of Senate Republicans — including Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul — have suggested they might withhold support from the bill, threatening its chances of passing the Senate as written.
The conservative meeting attendee said he advised Trump that the second healthcare bill, which will need to attract even more votes to survive than the one struggling to gain traction on Capitol Hill now, will take far longer to become law than the president may like.
“I told him to have [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell jump in and get the vote scheduled. He kind of looked at me when I said that, digested it, and the staff kind of jumped in,” the attendee said. “Honestly, I think the real timetable [for phases two and three] is a few months later when it sinks in that Obamacare has been repealed and Democrats might be willing to cut a deal of some sort.”
That attendee suggested the absence of one of Trump’s key healthcare promises — the ability to purchase health insurance plans across state lines — from the current bill is concerning because the provision is unlikely to survive the legislative process if Republicans attempt to stick it in the second bill.
“If you don’t get competition across state lines in the first bill, the insurance industry is going to be popping champagne everywhere knowing that they can stop the next bill,” he said. “That is the big battle here. The big winner or loser is the health insurance industry, who I think drafted most of this bill.”
Many of the conservative leaders who met with Trump on Wednesday expressed optimism about the president’s willingness to listen to their problems with the American Health Care Act. Martin said Trump approached their concerns “very seriously and very respectfully.”
“He did not shut down things that we were saying,” she said. “He did not make any commitments to anything, either.”
Jason Pye — spokesman at FreedomWorks, whose president attended the meeting — also acknowledged that Trump listened carefully to the conservatives’ reservations about the bill.
“The president said he is open to changes and we’re taking him at his word on that,” Pye said. “We believe the bill would have to be changed for us to get to a ‘yes.”
“We want to support this,” Pye added. “But we don’t want to support a bill that is ostensibly the same format as Obamacare.”
