Report: Paul Ryan tells GOP donors House will still pursue health care reform
Speaker Paul Ryan told GOP donors Monday that the House will continue pursuing health care reform despite Republicans’ failure to pass legislation last week to repeal and replace Obamacare as they had promised to do, according to The Washington Post.
The Wisconsin Republican spoke to donors on a phone call through his political organization, the report said, and he explained that they would work on health care on “two tracks.”
“We are going to keep getting at this thing,” Ryan said, according to the Post, which obtained a recording of the call. “We’re not going to just all of a sudden abandon health care and move on to the rest. We are going to move on with rest of our agenda, keep that on track, while we work the health care problem. . . . It’s just that valuable, that important.”
Ryan suggested that he would reveal a more detailed path forward during a retreat in Florida later this week.
“When we’re in Florida, I will lay out the path forward on health care and all the rest of the agenda,” he said. “I will explain how it all still works, and how we’re still moving forward on health care with other ideas and plans. So please make sure that if you can come, you come — it will be good to look at what can feasibly get done and where things currently stand. But know this: We are not giving up.”
This comes after Republicans spent several weeks advancing the American Healthcare Act (AHCA) to the floor to repeal and replace Obamacare. The White House had backed the measure, but in the end, they couldn’t rack up enough votes to pass it in the lower chamber. For two consecutive days late last week, Republicans scheduled a floor vote and pulled the bill both times as they discovered it lacked support.
