The GOP's Health Care Plan Is Dead

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Chip Somodevilla

On Friday afternoon House Speaker Paul Ryan reportedly rushed to the White House for an emergency meeting with Donald Trump. The subject: the American Health Care Act, the GOP's proposed replacement for the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare). The news: The Republican leader's bill did not have the votes to make it through the House.

Though the President had issued an ultimatum Thursday evening—"Pass the bill or Obamacare stays"—the self-renowned deal maker failed to accomplish his goal: Paul Ryan officially pulled the AHCA on Friday, dashing seven years' worth of "repeal and replace" promises.

“We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future," Ryan said during a press conference Friday.

Following this crushing defeat, Trump blamed the Democrats in an interview with The New York Times—despite the Republican party holding control in both houses of Congress—and said he anticipates working with the Democratic caucus on health care once "Obamacare explodes." Sources close to Trump said he had wanted to pursue tax reform before tackling health care, and the President says that this will be his next focus. That said, it's unlikely that the Republicans' battle to roll back the ACA is truly over. But in the meantime, 24 million people will retain their health care, and these essential health services will stay intact:

Pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care will remain in place.
One of the key components of the Affordable Care Act was the requirement that insurance companies cover 10 essential health benefits, like hospitalization, prescription care, and mental health services. Another major component of this provision: requiring health insurance companies to include pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care in all insurance plans. During the negotiations for the AHCA, the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus refused to vote for the bill unless these provisions were stripped. Following the failure of Trumpcare, these benefits will remain in place—much to the chagrin of the roomful of men who tried to strip this care from the millions of women who need it.

Millions of Medicaid recipients will not be left in the cold.
Before the ACA, states could individually determine who was eligible for Medicaid coverage. After the ACA became law, however, the standards for who qualified for Medicaid became uniform, and any state who participated in the expansion program had to adhere to them. This gave more low-income people—many of whom had not been accepted prior to 2010—the health care coverage they needed and allocated more federal funding to support the program. The AHCA would have kept the expansion going until 2020, but would have phased out the ACA's additional federal funding and turned to a system with less funding and greater ability to keep people from receiving Medicaid. Keep in mind, nearly half of newborns in the United States are born to mothers on Medicaid. This is a victory not only for low-income Americans but also for children and their mothers.

Planned Parenthood won't lose its funding.
Another stipulation of AHCA's Medicaid revisions would deny federal funding to any health care provider that included abortions in its services. This meant that Planned Parenthood, which gets 75 percent of its funding from Medicaid reimbursements, would stand to lose an overwhelming amount of money under the proposed legislation (remember that no federal money goes to abortion services under the Hyde Amendment). Though it's likely that Planned Parenthood will once again face financial uncertainty when the House votes on next year's budget, today numerous clinics throughout the country don't have to worry about closing their doors—and millions of women (and men!) don't have to fear losing their health care.

Democrats in the House and Senate were, of course, overjoyed with the news and took to the President's preferred method of communication to Tweet their thoughts:

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Others, however, took a more grounded approach, and reminded Americans to be vigilant about attacks on their health care:

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