After the Republican ObamaCare replacement bill failed to generate enough Republican support to pass a House vote Friday, President Trump announced his planned path forward: "Let ObamaCare explode."
Having insisted there is no Plan B in case the bill failed, the White House found itself in a situation with no backup plan now. "We're going to go back and figure out what the next steps are," House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters at a press conference just minutes after the shocking news that the GOP was pulling the bill hit the wires. Ryan called the failure of his bill "a setback, no two ways about it." Looking forward, Ryan said Obamacare is "going to remain the law of the land until it’s replaced. We didn’t have the votes to replace this law. So yeah, we’re going to be living with ObamaCare for the foreseeable future."
A disappointed and embarrassed House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Greg Walden was blunt with reporters: "This bill's done."
In a statement to the media, Trump said that if things get bad enough, Democrats will come aboard the reform effort. At that point, Trump said, it will become possible to pass a bill even better than Ryan's. "They're going to reach out whenever they're ready."
Until then, Trump said that "we were very close and it was a very, very tight margin. We had no Democrat support. We had no votes from the Democrats. They weren’t going to give us a single vote so it’s a very difficult thing to do."
Putting a positive spin on events, Trump then said that "I’ve been saying for the last year and a half that the best thing we can do politically speaking is let ObamaCare explode," Trump said of the path forward. "It is exploding right now. Many states have big problems, almost all states have big problems. I was in Tennessee the other day and they’ve lost half of their state in terms of an insurer. They have no insurer. And that’s happening to many other places."
"I was in Kentucky the other day and similar things are happening," he continued. "So, ObamaCare is exploding with no Democrat support. We couldn’t quite get there with just a very small number of votes short in terms of getting our bill passed."
"People will see how bad it is and it's getting much worse," Trump added. "I said the other day when President Obama left, '17, he knew he wasn't going to be here. '17 is going to be a very bad year for ObamaCare, very, very bad. You're going to have explosive premium increases and your deductibles are so high people don't even get to use it."
"But we’re very, very close," he said. "And, again, I think what will happen is ObamaCare, unfortunately, will explode."
Trump also said the losers from Friday's failed vote are Democrats. "The losers are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer because now they own ObamaCare," Trump said. "They own it, 100 percent own it. And this is not a Republican health care, this is not anything but a Democrat health care, and they have ObamaCare for a little while longer until it ceases to exist, which it will at some point in the near future."
Pelosi did not agree and called today's aborted ObamaCare repeal a "great day for our country." "What happened on the floor," she said, "is a victory for the American people."
"I don’t know what else to say other than ObamaCare is the law of the land," Ryan told reporters late Friday. "It’s going to remain the law of the land until it’s replaced. We didn’t have the votes to replace this law. So yeah, we’re going to be living with ObamaCare for the foreseeable future."