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Pressure is on moderates over revised health care plan

HAMILTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Moderate Republicans face intense pressure on their party’s latest attempt to scrap Democrat Barack Obama’s health care law — from President Donald Trump, House GOP leaders, medical professionals and outside political groups.

Back home, their constituents provide little clarity.

Views are deeply held and deeply divided, reflective of dueling impulses to fulfill the seven-year-old GOP promise to repeal the law and to save many of its parts.

Meridene Walsh, 49, of Greenwood Village, Colo., voted for Donald Trump for president last year partly because she wanted the Affordable Care Act gone. Now, she’s frustrated that House Republicans, including her own representative, Mike Coffman, are balking.

“The Republicans keep saying ‘repeal, repeal’ for seven years and a new president gets into office and what happens?” Walsh said with disgust as she stood outside a supermarket in the affluent Denver suburb. “I really want them to finish.”

Minutes later, David Murray left the same store and praised Obama’s law. He needed surgery to repair two discs in his back, and the law’s prohibition on insurance companies discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions is what allowed him to find a new insurer to pay for the procedure.

“If it wasn’t for Obama-Care, I might not be walking,” said Murray, a 46-year-old commercial driver. “There’s no reason to change something without making it better.”

The latest iteration of the GOP bill would let states escape a requirement under Obama’s law that insurers charge healthy and seriously ill customers the same rates.

Overall, the legislation would cut the Medicaid program for the poor, eliminate Obama’s fines for people who don’t buy insurance and provide generally skimpier subsidies.

If the GOP bill became law, congressional analysts estimate that 24 million more Americans would be uninsured by 2026, including 14 million by next year.

That bill fizzled before a planned vote in March when members of the conservative Freedom Caucus found the changes didn’t go far enough to get government out of health care and moderates objected to undoing the expansion of Medicaid insurance for low-income adults.

A new version has won over so conservatives with provisions to let states opt out of some requirements.

One new wrinkle: While insurers would still have to cover people with pre-existing conditions, they would now be able to charge higher premiums.

The moderate Republicans who were on the fence last time are crucial to the outcome.

In Coffman’s district, hundreds flooded a library where he was privately meeting constituents in January, and Coffman left through a rear door. After Coffman announced he supported the earlier repeal, he endured hours of boos at a town hall he held.

The debates can be internal, too.

Sandra Pendragon, 48, would prefer that the federal government would have less say over people’s lives. On the other hand, the Democrat in Republican Rep. Chris Smith’s New Jersey district, said, “scrapping the whole thing is just ridiculous.”

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