GOP leaders press ahead on health bill

WASHINGTON -- Facing mounting rank-and-file defiance, Republican leaders and the White House redoubled their efforts Tuesday to muscle legislation overhauling America's health-care system through Congress after a sobering report about millions being shoved off insurance coverage.

President Donald Trump, whose strong Election Day showing in GOP regions makes him the party's ultimate Capitol Hill vote wrangler, discussed the legislation by phone with the House's two top Republicans. He also dispatched Vice President Mike Pence and health secretary Tom Price to hear GOP senators' concerns.

With leaders hoping to move the measure through the House next week so the Senate can debate it, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged they were open to changes.

Trump's spokesman affirmed a willingness to accept revisions to win support.

"This has never been a take it or leave it," press secretary Sean Spicer said.

The GOP bill is the party's response to seven years of promising to repeal President Barack Obama's 2010 health-care overhaul.

It would undo that law's individual mandate, which requires most people to have coverage, by ending the tax penalty on those who don't.

It also would provide age-based tax credits instead of the subsidies geared to income in Obama's statute, end that law's expansion of Medicaid and curb its future spending and let insurers boost rates for seniors.

On Monday, the Congressional Budget Office said the Republican legislation would reduce the ranks of the insured by 24 million in a decade, largely by cutting Medicaid recipients and people buying individual policies. That would be more than the 20 million who've gained coverage under Obama's overhaul -- and attach a big number to a problem haunting GOP governors and members of Congress whose states have benefited from "Obamacare."

"I plan to vote NO" on the GOP bill, tweeted Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., among a mounting number of Republicans who expressed opposition following the report's release. "As written the plan leaves too many from my #SoFla district uninsured."

The budget office report also said the measure would reduce federal deficits by $337 billion over the next decade, largely by cutting Medicaid, the health-insurance program for the poor, and eliminating Obama's subsidies for low- and middle-income people.

The report said the bill's changes would result in federal subsidies that would fall to half their current size in a decade, and older, lower-earning people would be hit especially hard.

Those findings further energized Democrats, who already were opposing the GOP repeal effort unanimously.

"Of course you can have savings if you cut off millions of people from access to health care," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California.

Pence and Price discussed the legislation over lunch with GOP senators at the Capitol.