WASHINGTON (AP) – The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers plan to continue their uphill effort to exhume the House GOP’s all-but-buried health care bill, but remain adrift and divided over how to reshape it to attract enough votes to muscle it through the chamber.
White House officials and leading legislators aimed to resume talks Wednesday. Late Tuesday, they failed in a Capitol basement office meeting to shake hands on a White House proposal to let states seek federal waivers to drop coverage mandates that President Barack Obama’s health care law slapped on the insurance industry.
“All of us want an agreement,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., told reporters after two dozen lawmakers from both ends of the GOP spectrum huddled with Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials. Meadows added, “There’s a whole lot of things that we have to work out.”
Meadows leads the conservative House Freedom Caucus, whose roughly three dozen members have largely opposed the GOP legislation for not going far enough to abrogate Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and their opposition helped to thwart the measure in the House in late March.
The White House offers got an uneven reception earlier Tuesday from GOP moderates and conservatives, leaving prospects shaky that the party could salvage one of its leading legislative priorities. There was no evidence that the proposals won over any of the GOP opponents who humiliated President Donald Trump and House leaders on March 24, forcing them to cancel a planned vote on a Republican health care bill that was destined to lose.