House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., remains "very confident" in Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act after President Donald Trump delivered a speech promising "reforms that expand choice, increase access, lower costs, and at the same time, provide better healthcare."
When asked on Fox News' "Fox and Friends" how confident he is in his party's work on healthcare, Scalise said "very confident."
"In fact we've been working with the president for weeks now since he's been president, even before during the transition, on how to repeal and replace Obamacare," he said
Scalise was then asked how Republicans can get the conservative House Freedom Caucus to work with the more moderate House Speaker Paul Ryan and his supporters.
"Well we're talking to them on a regular basis," he answered. "There's no one bill that anybody can write on their own that's going to get 218 votes to pass, because you've got to have a lot of people with different ideas. But the good news is we're talking about those ideas, there are a lot of good ones out there, but at the end of the day we have to come together with a bill that's going to pass the House and pass the Senate, and get to the president's desk that he signs, and we're going to do that, and we're doing it in the next few weeks."
A draft of a Republican plan to replace Obamacare leaked Monday. Scalise told reporters Tuesday that is was "no longer even a viable draft that we're working off of," due to the inclusion of refundable tax credits, according to The Hill.
According to the majority whip, the main area Republicans can't agree on is "how to handle the transition.
"It's complicated because it deals with people's personal lives, but that's why we're meeting with not only members of Congress, we're talking to families, we're talking to doctors, we're talking to hospitals. We want this to work well with a transition so that people can actually have a plan that they can buy that's lower at cost, focus on lowering that cost and increasing access."
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