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President Trump made his view clear during his Feb. 28 address to Congress: Obamacare is a disaster which must be repealed and replaced.

However, House Republicans are wracked by divisions over how to go about repealing and replacing the health-care law.

Many conservative House members, including Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., chairman of the Republican Study Committee, have publicly opposed a draft of the GOP Obamacare repeal bill that was leaked last week.

Meadows took issue with the refundable tax credits included in the draft, saying they amount to a new entitlement program.

Walker echoed Meadows, saying the draft bill risks continuing major Obamacare entitlement expansions and delays any reforms. It kicks the can down the road in the hope that a future Congress will have the political will and fiscal discipline to reduce spending that this Congress apparently lacks.

Daniel Horowitz, senior editor at Conservative Review and author of Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges From Transforming America, similarly believes the GOP leaderships draft bill misses the boat.

The sad reality is Republicans, most of them in the House and let me tell you the House members make the Senate Republicans look like James Madison compared to them they dont understand free markets, Horowitz declared during a Wednesday appearance on the Fox Business Networks Lou Dobbs Tonight.

The official position of the Chamber of Commerce since 2012 has been to fix, not repeal, Obamacare. They dont understand that the worst parts of Obamacare are the actuarily insolvent regulations, and until you get rid of them and until you pursue lowering costs rather than this economic bean counting about coverage numbers, we are never going to get this right, and Trump was right last night: the way to cover more people is to lower costs.

Trumps address to a joint session of Congress came on the heels of a first month marked by hostility between the mainstream media and the White House.

A recently released analysis by Media Tenor, a nonpartisan media research firm, found only 3 percent of news stories about President Trump on NBC and CBS during Trumps first four weeks in office were positive, while 43 percent of stories on those two networks were negative.

Many conservatives consider rampant liberal bias in the mainstream media to be a given, but Horowitz urges President Trump to bypass the media by conveying a positive message directly to the American people, just as he did Tuesday night in his address to Congress.

The media is who they are, Horowitz told Dobbs. They are not going to change. The media is incorrigibly against conservatives, any Republican, certainly theyre against Trump.

But the key is for Trump not to become his own worst enemy and follow the media into their rabbit holes, and that was the lesson from last night where he was able to speak consistently on policy issues, sound upbeat, optimistic, forward-looking, and that is a way to get his views up into the consciousness of the American people and speak above the rancor of the media.

Who REALLY rules America? Stand up against the unelected tyrants in black. Find out how in Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges From Transforming America. Available now at the WND Superstore!

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Author to Lou Dobbs: House Republicans 'don't understand free markets!' - WND.com

New York Times (blog)

Smart Republicans? New York Times (blog) Ryan isn't a skilled politician inexplicably losing his touch, he's a con artist who started to believe his own con; Republicans didn't hammer out a workable plan because there is no such plan, and anyway they have no idea what that would involve. Or ... and more »

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Smart Republicans? - New York Times (blog)

President Donald Trump and other Republicans were quick to tout Fridays job report showing the U.S. economy added 235,000 jobs in February, but its worth looking at how they responded to similar good economic news under President Barack Obama.

Fridays jobs report, which showed unemployment at 4.7 percent, signals that the U.S. economy is moving in the right direction. But there have now been 77 consecutive months of job growth. When good job numbers came out under the Obama administration, Trump and other Republicans would undermine them by highlighting certain slow areas or suggesting that the numbers did not reflect an accurate picture of the American economy.

Trump has long claimed that the unemployment rate released in the monthly jobs report is artificially low, saying, inaccurately, in 2015 that it could be as high as 42 percent. Trump has argued that the unemployment number is misleading because it doesnt consider the number of people who have stopped looking for work, but even if you do include that figure, the numbers are nowhere close to what Trump claims.

Despite Trumps uncertainty about the unemployment rate, White House advisers and Republicans were quick to tout it Friday.

In August 2012, Sean Spicer, now the White House press secretary, was critical of the Obama administration after a jobs report showed that the unemployment rate had ticked up. But that same report noted that the economy had added 163,000 jobs, surpassing the expectations of economists.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee put out a statement on Friday touting the jobs numbers.

This is a great report. The fact that hundreds of thousands more people found new jobs last month is a good sign that our economy is moving in the right direction, he said in a statement. While we still have much more work to do, Im optimistic that the actions that President Trump and House Republicans are taking will add to this momentumcreating more jobs, growing families paychecks, and improving the lives of all Americans.

Brady also released a statement after the February jobs report came out last year, saying it was disappointing to see so little growth in full time work and wages. That jobs report showed that the U.S. economy had added 242,000 jobs, more than the number of jobs added in February of this year.

Asked about the statements, Brady spokeswoman Emily Schillinger, pointed to a HuffPost story highlighting how the February 2016 jobs report showed just 2.2 percent wage growth over the previous year, which wasnt enough for people to feel a difference in their lives. Fridays jobs report noted that hourly wages have increased 2.8 percent over the last year.

But in December, the jobs report showed 2.9 percent growth in hourly wages over the last year and Brady had a largely negative take on that report as well.

In June 2014, the U.S. economy added 304,000 jobs, but Reince Priebus, then chairman of the Republican National Committee and now Trumps chief of staff, still painted a grim picture of the economy.

Were glad to see some Americans found work last month, but we cant rest until jobs are easy to find, Priebus said in a statement at the time. Thats why Republicans have passed dozens of jobs bills in the House of Representatives. Sadly, Democrats in Washington, DC, have other priorities. The most recent GDP numbers not only revealed that the economy slowed down in the first quarter; they also showed that Democrat policies are wrong for the economy.

That report showed that the unemployment rate had declined 0.2 percentage points to 6.1 percent. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics noted that the unemployment rate had changed little over the month of February.

In 2012, as the economy steadily added jobs, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) criticized the Obama administration for not lowering the unemployment rate more quickly.

In November 2014, after the economy added 227,000 jobs and unemployment fell to the lowest level since 2008, McCarthy only gave tepid praise.

As Republicans played up Fridays jobs report, Elise Gould, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, noted that it was important to keep growth in context.

Fridays jobs report, which showed the economy adding 235,000 jobs in February, is notable for being the first BLS report of the Trump administration, she said in a statement. It may be tempting for todays policymakers to claim credit for this solid employment growth, but credit is only truly deserved when the economy grows faster than expected. Its important to remember that President Trump inherited an economy that was already making steady progress towards full employment.

Spicer said Friday that he believesthejob report numbers were accurate.

They may have been phony in the past, but its very real now, he said during a White House press briefing.

How will Trumps first 100 days impact you? Sign up for our weekly newsletter and get breaking updates on Trumps presidency by messaging us here.

This article has been updated with comment Sean Spicer made during the press briefing.

Continued here:
Republicans Are Suddenly Thrilled About The Jobs Report - Huffington Post

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., walks to a room on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 2, where he charges House Republicans are keeping their Obamacare repeal and replace legislation under lock and key. J. Scott Applewhite / AP

"Obamacare is dishonest in that it says, 'Yeah, we can expand it, but it won't cost anything,'" Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), an early critic of the GOP bill, told NBC News. "Our country has a $20 trillion debt. It's a huge burden that I think threatens the country from within."

More moderate Republicans, however, are worried about reducing funding or changing the program too rapidly.

Related:

In a

There are some complaints on the House side as well. "I remain concerned about the impact of the Medicaid changes on vulnerable populations, as well as the overall effect of the bill on access to affordable care," Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA), who represents a swing district, told NBC News in a statement.

While few members have declared their outright opposition to the bill, there's no obvious way to satisfy one side's concern without further alienating the other. That could make for a difficult negotiation as the party struggles with additional divisions over issues like tax credits for private insurance and whether to defund Planned Parenthood.

Some 32 states, including the District of Columbia, have accepted the ACA's increase in federal aid and many of the expansion states have Republican governors and state legislatures. Powerful advocacy groups representing doctors (

The controversy boils down to simple math. Under the House bill, states would have to make major cuts and raise taxes or simply drop coverage and benefits for the groups covered under the ACA. The Center on Budget and Policy priorities estimates that the House GOP plan would

This helps explain why Republican governors have been some of

As Kasich and other Republicans have mentioned, there are specific concerns tied to the opioid epidemic governors are confronting around the country and that President Donald Trump referenced often on the campaign trail. Medicaid pays for rehab and mental health treatment for many victims of drug abuse. In addition to removing millions from the program by undoing the expansion, some policy experts warn that the House's fixed per-capita formula would make it harder for states to respond to unexpected crises like drug outbreaks that raise the average cost of treating individual patients.

Caving in to the demands of moderate Republicans becomes even more complicated for another reason: The 19 states that have so far declined to participate in the Medicaid expansion.

These states paid a considerable price for their decision to stand with conservative activists demanding they hold the line against Obamacare with a future repeal bill in mind. A gap in the law created by the Supreme Court's Medicaid ruling left many poorer residents with incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid but too not high enough to qualify for subsidies to buy private insurance. The ACA also cut funding to hospitals for uninsured patients that the Medicaid expansion was supposed to make up.

The House bill makes some money available to non-expansion states elsewhere to try and address these fairness concerns, but any moves to bring more moderate senators into the fold in the expansion states could upset this balance.

"If a state expanded their Medicaid they should not somehow get a benefit from having done so versus a state that did what I thought was responsible at great political cost," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), whose governor turned down the expansion, told NBC News.

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Why Medicaid Is So Hard for Republicans - NBCNews.com

Republicans are in a box. A yuge, terrific box of their own making, rhetorically crafted over the course of seven long years, but a box nonetheless. Its walls are equal parts procedural, political, and perceptual. Think of the GOP as Indiana Jones, sandbag in hand, trying to make off with the Democrats Golden Idol. Except that the idol swap is more like a bad game of Jenga, they lack the votes to start from scratch, and the electoral (if not actuarial) boulder is gaining on them either way.

Mixed metaphors aside, Ramesh Ponnuru is right when he points out that the harsh judgment on the American Health Care Act has been rendered without acknowledging the parameters within which Republicans are forced to work. Only so much can be done while maintaining the senatorial privilege of budget reconciliation, and even within those narrow confines you still have to account for ideological tensions both within and between the respective congressional chambers. So before delving into the bill itself, lets stipulate that this isnt anyones ideal. If mutual ambivalence is the hallmark of a good compromise, this bill is a doozy.

That said, I dont recall any asterisks in the mountains of campaign literature promising to repeal and replace. There was no fine print about the filibuster in the TV ads, no disclaimers about the Byrd Rule in the radio spots. Fairly or unfairly, Republicans are being graded on a curve of their own making even if that means campaigns floated political checks the conference cant legislatively cash.

But lets get back to the AHCA. By now the bill has been picked apart by the Left and the Right. We know what it is and what it isnt. So the operative question is binary and twofold: First, is this the best reform Republicans can achieve within the constraints of what can be signed into law? And second, is it better than doing nothing?

Substantively speaking, I yield to thoughtful conservative health-reform voices, such as Avik Roy and Philip Klein. There are certainly elements to like in the plan, but it does seem to arbitrarily pick and choose which of the underlying regulatory rails can be touched. As for what can plausibly be passed, the repeal bill vetoed by President Obama in early 2016 is almost certainly off the table now that Republicans are playing with live ammunition. And even if clean repeal was a default option, it would leave any parallel replacement bill subject to an inevitable Democratic filibuster. Suffice it to say that any legislative sausage with a path to the presidents desk wont be particularly pretty.

Assessing the second question is more complicated. Leaving aside the indignity of belly-flopping on the partys most visible priority in the first 100 days, failure to pass a repeal measure would imperil the rest of the GOPs legislative agenda. Beyond delivering on an explicit campaign promise, the most important aspect of ACA repeal is its role as a stalking horse for tax reform. Obamacare taxes represent half a trillion dollars in federal revenue over the ten-year budgetary window. Which is to say that a post-ACA baseline is imperative to lowering tax rates anywhere near the levels envisioned by President Trump and congressional Republicans. Indeed, the House tax-reform blueprint assumes these levies have been repealed in order for the internal arithmetic to work. And given the ongoing heartburn over border adjustability and changes to treatment of corporate interest expenses (both trillion-dollar line items in their own right), failure to eliminate the ACAs taxes would likely deal a crippling blow to any permanent, substantial reforms to the code.

On the other hand, the political Pottery Barn rule is in full effect as Democrats learned all too well, if you break it, you buy it. If Republicans truly believe Obamacare is in a death spiral and will collapse under its own weight, they had better be confident that nibbling around the edges of the law will be enough to stabilize the system. Otherwise this will be at best a pyrrhic victory, absolving Democrats and leaving Republicans exposed to whatever fallout is yet to come. And regardless of the macro effects, Democrats will be armed with countless heartbreaking anecdotes buttressed by ugly CBO coverage projections. If youre going to be blamed for disrupting a massive economic sector, youd better make sure its your best shot.

At the end of the day, Republicans have a fateful choice: pass this bill largely as is, pass it in a significantly modified form, or pass nothing at all. Unless the reforms can stand on their own merits, the GOP runs the risk of swallowing the spider to catch the Obamacare fly. And thats a perilous move no matter how many seats they owe to the fly-swatter.

Liam Donovan is a former GOP staffer who works in government relations in Washington, D.C.

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In Replacing Obamacare, Republicans Face the Pottery Barn Rule - National Review