President Donald Trump and critics of the House plan to replace Obamacare met at the White House on Tuesday, allowing his team to make a case for the bill to skeptical conservative groups.
David McIntosh of Club for Growth, Jim DeMint of Heritage, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity, Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, Mike Needham of Heritage Action, and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots were all present for the meeting, according to the White House.
White House sources at the meeting speaking to CNN’s Jim Acosta said Trump appeared open to some changes to the bill to make it more appealing to conservatives.
“This is going to be great. You’re going to make it even greater,” Trump said to the groups, according to a source.
The White House appeared open to speeding up a rollback of the current Medicaid expansion to 2018 and delaying some of the changes to the insurance market, Politico said. But the tax credit subsidies for low-income Americans to help purchase health care do not appear to be open for negotiation.
It appears that Trump is not ready to kill the bill Speaker Paul Ryan proposed and put forward a new one, something that some conservatives have begged him to do.
According to Acosta, Trump cautioned conservatives to stop calling the bill “Obamacare Lite,” warning that they were helping Democrats.
But he signaled that if the bill failed, the administration would make Democrats own the impending healthcare crisis, according to Politico.
It’s not the first time that Trump has appeared open to letting Obamacare collapse on its own.
“So the easiest thing would be to let it implode in ’17, and believe me we’d get pretty much whatever we want but it would take a long time,” Trump said in January.
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