Tomorrow President Trump will be meeting with members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss their concerns with the ongoing Tom Price and Paul Ryan healthcare bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Today President Trump and Vice President Pence held a listening session with those affected by the current insurance market.
In this video President Trump listening to those who purchase health insurance on the individual market. Each of the people participating in the discussion shared their experience with the collapsing system.  Many of the stories are heart breaking.

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Hopefully the intransigent Freedom Caucus members will be listening to the voices of the average Americans who are being crushed by the ‘status quo’.
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As more people begin seeing through the fog of political “talking points”, the next response from those suffering from battered conservative syndrome is to say: well, do nothing, and allow ObamaCare to simply self-destruct.
Unfortunately, this is not an option.  At least it’s not a reasonable option.  To understand how battered conservatives are being lead around, used and abused, it is very important to understand the abusers.  There are many.

Last week Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin informed congress it will soon be necessary to raise the debt ceiling.   Immediately, crony-constitutional conservative types, like many who assemble in the House Freedom Caucus, shouted “no way”; apparently, according to their pearl-clutching political position – it unnerves their fiscally conservative sensibilities.
Interesting.
On October 21st, 2015, the Freedom Caucus itself backed Paul Ryan for Speaker of the House of Representatives. (LINK)  A week later, October 28th, 2015, members of the same Freedom Caucus voted to approve a $2+ trillion dollar Omnibus spending bill, a massive continuing resolution, and removed the debt ceiling restrictions (link).  Two days later, October 30th, 2015, at 3:00am in the morning, the Omnibus CR bill passed the Senate (link).
This was yet another year without a federal budget, and a specific decision to fund all of Obama’s spending priorities for 2015 and 2016.  (more…)

On Saturday in Louisville, Ky., Vice President Mike Pence spoke about President Donald Trump’s plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare.  Anyone else notice Kentucky Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul were not present?

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“The ObamaCare nightmare is about to end. … Virtually every promise with ObamaCare has been broken,” Pence said, adding Kentucky is one of the many states negatively affected by the Affordable Care Act.
Pence promised that ObamaCare would not continue, since it has been a top priority of the Trump administration to repeal and replace the program.
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In the largest measure, the basic problem is in 2009 Harry Reid passed the ObamaCare legislation in the Senate with 60 votes.  The House then passed the exact same bill, and the Democrats moved to immediate reconciliation to remove the House concerns (Gator-Aid, Cornhusker Kickback, Louisiana Purchase etc.).
In 2017 the Republican congress are attempting to repeal and replace that ObamaCare legislation with only 52 Senate votes available, well, maybe.
Unfortunately for the GOP there are not even 52 votes for repeal.  Portman, Thune, Collins, Murkowski, Graham, McCain, Blunt, Cochran, Cornyn, Hatch, McConnell and others, are not necessarily on board; that’s 11. (Leaving only 41).
No amount of byzantine rule changes surrounding “reconciliation” are going to overcome that factual vote hurdle.  In 2009 Senator Reid started with 60 votes.  In 2017 Senator McConnell starts with 52.

So anything coming from the House of Representatives has to keep this reality in mind.  Even if support or opposition is based on ideological principle, it still has to pass – or it’s moot.
There’s no doubt the Paul Ryan proposal holds the worst U.S. CoC aspects demanded by Tom Donohue.  Heck, Donohue poured a lot of lobbying money into the entire architecture in ’09/’10 and he’s paid republicans in congress hundreds of millions to make sure his interests in keeping ObamaCare around are protected.  Ryan is big GOPe and he’s supported by the Big Club.
And, as much as Paul Ryan is beholden to Donohue to retain some form of ObamaCare, so too are the Rand Paul / Ted Cruz types paid by billionaires like Cary Katz (Conservative Review); who want an abject repeal without compromise. (more…)

Earlier today President Trump and Vice President Pence held a meeting with key congressional committee leaders to discuss the ongoing healthcare reform.

[Transcript] 11:50 A.M. EST – THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody.  I want to thank each of the House committee leaders for being with us today.  Your devotion and leadership has been amazing, and I want to just applaud you and the diligent work of your committees to advance the Obamacare repeal-and-replacement legislation that we’ve been talking about for a long time, and that we’ve been running with and I ran with, and I can tell you.  And that’s what people want, they want repeal-and-replace.  The bill passed just now through Ways and Means, and it will — I think the committee just voted recently, right?
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It’s obvious the financial interests are pouring in money to the R.A.T groups right now in the fight over ObamaCare Repeal and/or Replace.   Boy howdy are they all fibbing as they fling their poo at each other.  Forget the Democrats in this discussion.  For the sake of this analysis we only look at the right side of the UniParty; the Republican side.

There are two financial special interest groups within the Republican fight on ObamaCare. Two groups within the BIG CLUB.  Essentially, two swamp R.A.T factions:
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Good news, they’re listening to you.  No other approach to repealing ObamaCare is possible.  It’s not ideological, it is simply reality.  The backstory on our prior explanations are HERE and expanded HERE.
After listening to conservative groups at a White House meeting yesterday, it became obvious to POTUS  those group leaders/members did not understand WHY no other approach to repeal is possible.   POTUS asked Speaker Ryan to put this together and deliver it today:

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Most of you already know this outline because you’ve understood the bigger picture.  Hopefully this message will reach the 99% who don’t understand that “reconciliation” doesn’t allow for substantive structural add-ons to ObamaCare, until step #3.  Again, HERE and HERE.

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Put this in the ‘things you won’t see on CNN’ file: Trying to retain their resistant bona fides Democrat Representatives Elijah Cummings and Peter Welch emerge from a meeting with, with, with the bad man, President Trump, seemingly infected with r-r-r-respect.
Aiieeeee… resist we much, and we much, about this, be committed.. Pelosi desperately shouting: “stay away from the light… don’t walk toward the light”… oh noes, the swamp, they’re, they’re walking the-wrong-way…  OMG.  “Curse You Villain !!”
Elijah Cummings obviously having a hard time shaking it off.  It took him a few minutes to gather back his oppositional composure:

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Two important videos containing two important aspects to advancing legislation.  In the first video President Trump is meeting with Republican House “whip team”.  The role of the House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise, is to get the various republicans factions to unite in support of a singular legislative goal.  Unite the clans.
President Trump is not meeting with the House Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, because Trump views McCarthy as a weasel (don’t ask – just watch).  President Trump gives remarks to the media during the White House meeting:

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The second meeting is Speaker Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Greg Walden. Ryan, McCarthy and Walden outline the three-step legislative process that a full and replace bill needs.
Walden outlines the House Energy and Commerce Committee beginning the mark-ups on the bill which starts tomorrow.
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There are bazillions of opinions on the current ObamaCare repeal and replace efforts. Many people are rightly concerned their wants, wishes or needs do not seem addressed within the Price/Ryan bill announced last night.
CTH is far from a SME on the details.  However, we do know the legislative “process” and we followed the original construct closely.  Many people are missing the big picture challenges with “repeal and replace” – perhaps we can explain a little, and maybe it will settle some nerves.

The best way to explain what appears to be the Price/Ryan legislative road-map is to remind ourselves how a Dem legislature was able to enact ObamaCare with zero Republican support.   In 2017 the reversal of this process also lines up to be a Republican repeal with zero Democrat support.
Way back in 2009 when ObamaCare was being constructed, there were two procedural legislative constructs to create ObamaCare- one from the House (Pelosi) and one from the Senate (Reid).
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