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A group of about a dozen Republican governors is pushing for its own set of national healthcare reforms, flexing its considerable muscle in the national debate over the future of Obamacare as the U.S. Senate begins writing its bill.

Led by Governor John Kasich of Ohio, the governors are using a nine-page proposal they crafted in February as the platform to shape what they think a critical portion of an Obamacare replacement law should look like, according to a half dozen people who helped write the plan.

Among the groups recommendations for the Senate include maintaining the expansion of Medicaid, the government healthinsuranceprogram for the poor and disabled, while also limiting federal spending for certain populations, according to a copy of the proposal.

Members of the group, which include governors from Utah, Tennessee and Michigan, are also now looking to form a bipartisan coalition of states to propose reforms for the individualinsurance market, according to one source, that they hope the Senate will also use.

Gov. John Kasich

They have not yet met or decided on specific reforms about the individualinsurancemarket, but the goal is to address issues such as how to makeinsurancemore affordable and stabilize the markets.

The House of Representatives narrowly passed its national healthcare bill earlier this month, called the American Health Care Act, which would slash federal Medicaid funding by more than $800 billion over the next decade.

It has prompted fierce criticism from both Republican and Democratic governors.

Kasich recently called the bill inadequate, and said it would leave millions of people without affordable coverage and living in the emergency rooms again.

Pressure is building from their constituents.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which has been tracking public opinion on health care issues for the past several years, has found that Republicans are more supportive than they were in 2013 of benefits including expanded Medicaid andinsurancesubsidies for low-income families and a government requirement that small businesses provideinsurancefor their employees.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English across the United States and gathered responses from 2,126 adults, including 887 Republicans. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for the entire group and 4 percentage points for Republicans.

The governors group is looking to the Senate for massive changes as they begin writing their own bill.

Several groups, from insurers and hospitals to medical groups and patient advocates, are trying to influence the Senate. But the governors carry extra weight because they will ultimately be responsible for implementing whatever healthcare overhaul is signed into law, and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly spoken about the need to have fewer federal regulations apply to Medicaid and commercialinsurance.

Under Obamacare, more than 30 states, including about a dozen Republican-led states, expanded Medicaid. One of the thorniest issues Republicans have grappled with is treating both expansion and non-expansion states equally. Governors from both types of states united to craft Medicaid proposals in the hope that their voice would carry added weight and provide a surer path for lawmakers.

The governors are also in the same boat politically as U.S. senators because both are elected statewide, rather than in smaller districts as House representatives are. So many governors and their senators have been better aligned on what healthcare reform should look like, several of the sources said.

Several governors and their staff said they have been in regular contact with their senators, and will be pushing for the Senate to use the governors set of reforms as a framework in writing its bill.

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio wrote in an op-ed Monday that he and other senators tasked with writing a healthcare bill have continued to engage with governors, many of who share my concerns about Medicaid but who also want more flexibility to ensure they can design health care programs that meet the individual needs of their states.

He added that the Senate will continue to work with governors on healthcare reform.

They are definitely hearing our concerns and questions. They have been very attentive to our interests, said Nathan Checketts, deputy director of the Utah Department of Health.

The group of Republican governors has worked to have a unified voice to reconcile needs among a diverse set of states, including Arizona, Illinois, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Nevada. Its leaders, which also include Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan and Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona, deliberately chose some participants from states with influential Republican senators who would become key players in a federal healthcare overhaul.

A 13-member Senate panel has been tasked with writing a healthcare bill, and at least five of its senators are from states from the Republican governors group, including Portman, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Mike Lee of Utah and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

Other Republican senators with governors in the group including Dean Heller of Nevada and Jeff Flake of Arizona are up for reelection in 2018.

As Senate Republicans take up the bill, one of the most complicated policy and political issues they must grapple with is Medicaid reform.

States that expanded Medicaid, such as Ohio and Michigan, have said a healthcare overhaul must protect those who gained coverage under Obamacare. Non-expansion states, meanwhile, have said they do not want to be penalized with less federal funding because they did not expand and therefore cover fewer people.

The governors proposal recommends maintaining Obamacares Medicaid expansion and giving other states the opportunity to expand, but capping federal spending on certain populations through either block grants or per capita caps.

It would provide states the option to phase in other groups, such as parents and children, to per capita caps or block grants, and it recommends reducing federal regulations on states and their Medicaid programs.

(Additional reporting by Chris Kahn; Editing by Caroline Humer and Edward Tobin)

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Republican Governors Have Own Ideas for Healthcare Reforms - Insurance Journal

New York Times

Republicans Pivot and Make Comey the Capitol's Most-Wanted Man New York Times WASHINGTON Republicans on Wednesday abruptly pivoted and rushed to call on James B. Comey, who was fired as F.B.I. director by President Trump last week, to testify before several committees, produce memos and provide greater detail of his ... The Republican Party Is Just Starting to Realize How Much Donald Trump Is Screwing ThemGQ Magazine Republicans and Democrats demanding answers after Comey memoABC News Vulnerable Republicans flee from TrumpPolitico McClatchy Washington Bureau -NBCNews.com -Washington Post -Washington Post all 8,216 news articles »

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Republicans Pivot and Make Comey the Capitol's Most-Wanted Man - New York Times

A group of House Republicans who have called for a new $500 million fund to upgrade the governments aging tech tools huddled with President Donald Trump and his top aides on Thursday.

The meeting convened in part by Jared Kushner, one of Trumps leading advisers and the chief of the White Houses new Office of American Innovation comes as the administration begins its work to rethink the way government buys software, upgrades its computers and provides services, like electronic health records for veterans.

In attendance at the previously unannounced meeting was House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., along with nine other GOP lawmakers, a spokesman for McCarthy confirmed to Recode. Representing the White House, with Kushner, were Reed Cordish, one of the presidents top tech advisers, and Haley Van Dyck, the co-founder of the United States Digital Service. Trumps predecessor, President Barack Obama, created the group known as USDS in the aftermath of the Healthcare.gov technology meltdown.

Sources described the session as introductory. A White House aide said the focus was improving citizen experiences with government services. A spokesman, however, did not immediately provide a readout of what might have been said by Trump, who unexpectedly joined the gathering.

Still, the meeting comes a day after House Republicans joined with their Democratic counterparts to pass the Modernizing Government Technology Act, a proposal thats now awaiting Senate consideration and, potentially soon, a signature from the president.

The huddle with the GOPs tech-minded lawmakers also precedes another, larger confab between the Trump administration and top executives from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle and other tech companies, which is slated for June 19. The White House announced that meeting when Trump signed an executive order last month commissioning the American Technology Council, which is tasked with figuring out how to transform and modernize the aging federal bureaucracy and how it uses and delivers information.

We are excited to work with President Trump, Vice President Pence, Jared Kushner and the White House Office of American Innovation as we continue to advance legislation that embraces new technologies and harnesses the innovative spirit of our citizens to solve problems and better serve our constituents, McCarthy told Recode.

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Trump and his top aides met with Republican lawmakers to discuss ways to modernize government - Recode

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The Department of Justice appointed a special prosecutor on Wednesday night, and President Trump is suddenly in very real trouble.

The past few days have made it extraordinarily clear that Trump may have committed obstruction of justice. On Tuesday night, it was revealed that former FBI Director James Comey wrote a memo detailing how Trump asked him to stop the investigation into then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn. In Comey's reported recollection, Trump used an instantly iconic phrase: "I hope you can let this go."

Now, for the first time in Trump's presidency, there are small cracks in the wall of Republican denial about Trump's corruption. Several Republican congresspeople expressed concern or outrage John McCain directly compared it to Watergate. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the chair of the House oversight committee, has announced he will invite Comey to testify before Congress.

It's anybody's guess where this will all end up. But one thing can be clearly seen: The Republican engine of deception that has powered them into near-total control of American government is starting to come apart.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate the extent to which Republican politics has recently revolved around lies and deceit. Trump successfully ran for president lying that he would protect Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The party as a whole lied to the public (and themselves) about why it opposed ObamaCare (namely, because it raised taxes on the rich, and because Obama did it) and lied that their alternative would provide better, cheaper coverage.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the party's forward-facing "policy expert," built a public image as an anti-poverty crusader through equal parts operatic pity for the poor and lying about his actual policy agenda namely, slashing programs that help the poor. Ryan, together with Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, are now selling the American Health Care Act, which would catastrophically worsen both the extent and the quality of health insurance in the U.S., by lying about what it does and lying about what nonpartisan analyses say about it.

Finally, the party has long been engaged in a systematic effort to subvert American democracy by preventing liberals from voting, disenfranchising them by district boundary-cheating, and justified it by lying about an epidemic of voter fraud.

Republicans have lied about what they want, lied about why they want it, and cheated to get into a position where they could get what they want.

But like some criminal conspiracy falling apart under police grilling, Trump's presidency is starting to crack the facade of deception with which Republicans have protected themselves. Trump is crooked to the bone (a single minor story on Wednesday which would have been a weeks-long media feeding frenzy under any other president revealed deeply suspect ties between Trump and a Russian national bank), he keeps doing horribly unethical and arguably illegal things, and his administration leaks like a rusty colander. The leaking happens, says conservative Erick Erickson, because Trump pays more attention to the media than he does to his advisers so they leak to get him to listen to their arguments. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat, speaking off the record with White House insiders, says they "they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor."

As a result, devastating, bombshell stories are being churned out almost as fast as they can be written "the best reporters of their generation are participating in the journalistic equivalent of a dunking contest," as The Atlantic's Peter Beinart says.

All this is causing a sort of nervous breakdown in the conservative movement. One could almost hear the rivets straining on Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night, as he desperately lurched around for something to cover on his Fox News show other than the Comey/Flynn scandal. Sean Hannity, meanwhile, promoted a deranged Pizzagate-style conspiracy theory that elite Democrats were somehow involved in the murder of a DNC staffer against the wishes of the person's family, and long after it had been conclusively debunked.

Typical Fox News agitprop but for the first time I can remember, there was a palpable sense that even the hosts were straining to believe it. The viewers are also demoralized stunningly, the liberal hosts on MSNBC have started roundly beating the Fox News conservatives in the ratings.

Even for a deeply terrible person, a lie can become too big to swallow, and corruption too huge and glaring to ignore. And if any hearings get going, it is virtually certain that further damaging revelations will spill out by the score. Trump is a guy who is openly using the presidency to enrich his family, and whose entire business model for the last couple decades has relied on shady or known criminal sources of foreign financing. Simply cataloging all the corruption is going to take several book-length reports.

For the last 20 years and more, one would rarely have gone wrong betting on Republican perfidy. Ultimately, I simply can't bring myself to believe that more than a handful of Republicans will vote for impeachment, let alone the large numbers of GOP senators that would be needed to convict and remove Trump from office. It's not impossible, but the weight of history is against it and they are so close to their long-cherished dream of snatching health care from tens of millions of poor and working-class people (still very much a live possibility).

But an investigation with teeth will still badly harm a great source of the GOP's political strength: their zealotry. It's hard to work oneself into a froth about supposed liberal crimes against liberty when it is simply beyond debate that the president and leader of one's party is an addle-brained, corrupt liar.

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Trump's scandals are destroying the Republican machine - The Week Magazine

Asked whether he pressured the FBI to close its investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as was reported earlier this week President Donald Trump flatly said he had not.

"No, no. Next question," he said, speaking at a press conference with the Colombian president.

Asked if he thought he had committed a crime or impeachable offense, the president said "it's totally ridiculous, everyone thinks so."

In some of the longest exchanges with reporters during a week filled with explosive headlines, including news that Comey had penned a memo documenting the president asking him to stop investigating Flynn, Trump said he thought the decision to fire Comey would be bipartisan, said repeatedly there was "no collusion" between his campaign and Russia, and attempted to spin it as a partisan distraction.

Trump also boasted of what he saw as the tremendous success of his presidency.

Thats what I want to be focused on, because theres no collusion. Believe me. My total priority is the United States of America, Trump said.

Two senators confirmed that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein knew that FBI director James Comey would be fired when he penned a memo that the White House initially used to justify Comey's dismissal.

But the president later contradicted his own administration's narrative, telling NBC News he'd been wanting to fire Comey since the election, and that the Russia investigation was a factor.

Rosenstein "acknowledged that he learned Comey would be removed prior to him writing his memo," Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill said after a closed-door briefing with Rosenstein.

In his first discussion with reporters since the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to lead the investigation into Russian election interference, President Donald Trump condemned the decision and spun it as a political "excuse" during a White House lunch with news anchors.

"I believe it hurts our country terribly, because it shows we're a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country.And we have very important things to be doing right now, whether it's trade deals, whether it's military, whether it's stopping nuclear all of the things that we discussed today.And I think this shows a very divided country.

It also happens to be a pure excuse for the Democrats having lost an election that they should have easily won because of the Electoral College being slanted so much in their way.That's all this is.I think it shows division, and it shows that we're not together as a country.And I think it's a very, very negative thing.And hopefully, this can go quickly, because we have to show unity if we're going to do great things with respect to the rest of the world."

Senators are heading into an all-Senate briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein this afternoon, where both parties will be able to hear from the man whose memo was initially crediting for the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

The meeting is behind closed doors, but it may help senators better understand the lead-up to Comey's ouster.The White House initially said that the president had fired Comey at the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein, who wrote a memo hanging the recommendation on Comey's alleged mismanagement of the bureau's Hillary Clinton email investigation. But in an exclusive interview with NBC News' Lester Holt, Trump reversed the official explanation by saying hed been wanting to fire the FBI director since he was elected and gave Russia as the rationale.

"When I decided to [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story," Trump told Holt.

Rosenstein will give a similar briefing to the House tomorrow.

Amid a week of explosive headlines with talk of impeachment swirling, the Trump reelection team is in fundraising mode.

After crying "sabotage" in email and text fundraising messages yesterday, the campaign cashed in, raising $314,000 between the campaign and Republican National Committee's joint fundraising committee. According to a release from Trump's campaign, it's a "one-day record for digital fundraising."

Meanwhile, House Democrats announced that their campaign arm hassmashed fundraising records ahead of midterms, raising $20 millionsince the start of the year.

A top Republican has clarified that while former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn hasn't yet cooperated with the Senate Intelligence Committee, his lawyers have "not yet indicated their intentions" regarding a subpoena issued last week for documents relevant to the panel's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

North Carolina Republican and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr made the clarification after earlier asserting the committee believed he was refusing to comply with the Congressional subpoena. He said this was not a surprise, as Flynn had beengiving the committee radio silence on previous requests even before the subpoena was issued last week.

The committee has heard from fired FBI Director James Comey, but has not yet received documents from him.

- Frank Thorp, Marianna Sotomayor, Vaughn Hillyard

House Speaker Paul Ryan wants everyone to know that the turmoil currently roiling the White House will not imperil Congress from tackling the issues.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time, House Speaker Paul Ryan said at a press conference, attempting to turn the conversation back to the GOP agenda.

He didnt get far: a reporter asked if hed prefer to be working with Vice President Mike Pence.

Good grief, Ryan said, refusing to answer the question.

Leading Republicans are struggling to defend the president's decision to hire Michael Flynn as national security adviser in the wake of news that Flynn had warned the transition team he was under federal investigation.

Here, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Jason Chaffetz is pressed on the matter not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times, before finally conceding that Flynn "probably shouldn't have" been hired.

Looks like Russia isn't the only story of the day.

News broke Thursday morning that former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes had died. The TV mogul left the company he built earlier this year in the wake of a former anchors lawsuit and numerous allegations of sexual harassment.

The cause of death is not yet known publicly.

I am profoundly sad and heartbroken to report that myhusband, Roger Ailes, passed away this morning surrounded by hisbeautiful family, wife Elizabeth Ailes said in a statement.

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Flynn May Not Comply With Senate Intel Subpoena: Top Republican - NBCNews.com