Politico

Donald Trump’s White House and congressional GOP leaders are coalescing around an agenda focused on slashing taxes and repealing Obamacare early next year, a blueprint that could potentially avoid an intraparty clash over infrastructure investment early in Trump’s presidency.

On Wednesday morning, incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said that the GOP will concentrate on budgetary issues and health care reform in the first nine months of the year. That largely overlaps with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s focus on tax reform and Obamacare repeal and suggests the party will spend much of its energy and momentum on those two issues.

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An Obamacare repeal resolution will be the first item the Senate votes on next year, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday, underscoring the GOP’s commitment to repealing the law even as its replacement plan remains unclear.

McConnell told reporters that repealing Obamacare would be “the first item up in the new year,” and the Kentucky Republican that he would like to “get Democratic cooperation” during the difficult process of replacing “a very, very controversial law.”

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Congressional Republicans are setting up their own, self-imposed deadline to make good on their vow to replace the Affordable Care Act. With buy-in from Donald Trump’s transition team, GOP leaders on both sides of the Capitol are coalescing around a plan to vote to repeal the law in early 2017 — but delay the effective date for that repeal for as long as three years.

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday morning picked the founder and CEO of a health policy consulting firm, Seema Verma, to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“I am pleased to nominate Seema Verma to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,” said President-elect Trump in a statement. “She has decades of experience advising on Medicare and Medicaid policy and helping states navigate our complicated systems. Together, Chairman Price and Seema Verma are the dream team that will transform our healthcare system for the benefit of all Americans.”

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The House of Representatives has asked the Federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to temporarily pause the House lawsuit challenging an ACA subsidy program, a move that could allow the incoming Trump administration to swiftly unwind the ACA exchanges. The House argues that the ACA did not fund payments to health insurance companies to help low-income people pay for their out-of-pocket health care costs, which the Obama administration has been paying anyway. If the court approves the request, it would allow Trump’s new administration time to decide whether it wants to keep defending a pivotal part of the health care law as it plots out a strategy to repeal the ACA. If Trump’s Justice Department doesn’t continue to defend the ACA, the subsidies could be eliminated immediately (unless Congress makes a deliberate decision to legally fund them).

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The House Speaker wants Obamacare dead. The House Budget Chairman — a leading candidate for HHS secretary — wants Medicare reform. But all the focus on Republicans’ health strategies is ignoring the biggest elephant in the room: Donald Trump, a president-elect who’s spent more than a year bucking congressional Republicans — and may not share their priorities, two leading conservative thinkers tell POLITICO’s “Pulse Check” podcast.

“For all the times that the president-elect has expressed his desire to repeal and replace Obamacare … [he] campaigned on universal coverage,” said Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. “That’s a very different set of principles … than you might expect from a generic Republican president-elect.”

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Republicans on Capitol Hill are growing confident that they can begin to repeal Obamacare once President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in, along with a pledge to replace it later.

“We have an Obamacare emergency right now,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate HELP Committee. “I think we could move forward in January on some aspects of repeal but we need to make sure that we are helping people and that we do no harm.”

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Over the past few years, pundits have dismissed the Republican Party’s chances of repealing and replacing Obamacare. But with President-elect Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday and the GOP’s successful effort to keep control of Congress, conservatives now have a real chance to eliminate the health care law. The question is how to do it.

Three years into its implementation, the Affordable Care Act has clearly failed. The law has wrecked the individual market for health insurance—premiums have soared, coverage has been canceled en masse, and choices have been drastically curtailed. The cost of the law’s major coverage provisions—Medicaid expansion and subsidies for plans purchased through the exchanges—have soared. In fact, the per enrollee cost of the Medicaid expansion is nearly 50 percent above estimates.

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Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled the Senate would move swiftly to repeal Obamacare now that the GOP Congress will have a Republican president next year.

“It’s pretty high on our agenda as you know,” the Kentucky Republican said on Wednesday. “I would be shocked if we didn’t move forward and keep our commitment to the American people.”

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Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House puts President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act  in grave peril.

Ever since the law passed in 2010, Republicans have campaigned on a pledge to repeal Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement. Trump’s victory, with continued GOP control of Congress, gives them their first opportunity to do so.

Trump and congressional Republicans have set sky-high expectations for repealing Obamacare; he’s promised to scrap it “very very quickly.” And they have a road map to repeal significant parts of the law, even with a narrow Senate majority.

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