Senate ‘close’ to final health bill amid cries that Trump's tweets getting in way

Staff and agencies
Updated

  • Trump said to spend weekend making calls to ‘get package across finish line’

  • Health secretary forced to defend president after latest Twitter incident

Protesters against the US Senate Republicans’ healthcare bill hold a rally outside the US Capitol.
Protesters against the US Senate Republicans’ healthcare bill hold a rally outside the US Capitol. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

As Donald Trump’s health secretary fended off questions about whether the president is too distracted by Twitter to focus on healthcare reform, the White House’s top legislative liaison official said the Senate was “getting close” to agreement on a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, told Fox News Sunday Trump was spending the weekend making calls to lawmakers to “get the Senate package across the finish line”.

As Short spoke, Trump sparked a war of words in the media by tweeting a video, apparently taken from Reddit, of himself body-slamming a man with a CNN logo for a head, with the message: “#FraudNewsCNN #FNN”.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, the health and human services secretary, Tom Price, was asked if the president’s tweeting was getting in the way of the legislative effort.

“The fact of the matter is that he can do more than one thing at a time,” Price said, in a tense interview in which he also refused to comment on the president’s tweeted abuse of MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski.

“The president’s held multiple meetings within the White House itself,” Price added, “with physicians, with small-business groups, with other folks who have been harmed by Obamacare, with patients, individual stakeholders from across this land who tell him and have told us repeatedly that the current system is collapsing. And that’s what the president talks about.”

The Senate healthcare bill did not reach a vote this week, after conservative and moderate senators signalled their opposition, in the face of intense pressure from constituents and after a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score that said 22m Americans would be without health insurance by 2026 if the bill was passed.

In May, the CBO said the House version of healthcare reform, which was squeezed through the lower chamber and celebrated in the White House rose garden, would leave 23 million people without insurance in the same timeframe.

Short told Fox News Sunday the CBO now has two versions of the bill to score. The Texas senator Ted Cruz is pushing a conservative version that aims to aggressively reduce costs while the other version of the bill could bolster healthcare subsidies for lower-income people.

He also said: “CBO credibility should be certainly … be questioned at this point.” Senate Republicans have also been increasing political pressure on the CBO, a tack also followed by Price.

Short said the White House hoped to pass a repeal-and-replace bill. But he reiterated that Trump believes Republicans should consider an option of immediately repealing the ACA and replacing it later, if senators cannot reach agreement.

Trump suggested repeal without an immediate replacement in a tweet on Friday – an action that would break a key campaign promise. He also insisted this week that he is engaged with healthcare policy and knows and understands the details of the Senate bill.

“Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare,” the president tweeted on Wednesday. “Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for US.”