President Trump Meets Republican Study Committee
  • 7 years ago
Listen to the remarks by President Trump, Congressman Steve Scalise, and Congressman Mark Walker at Republican Study Committee Meeting.

This is a transcript from this meeting with President Trump:

MR. SCALISE: We appreciate President Trump having us into the Oval Office to talk about healthcare and the improvements that are being made. The President has worked and said, bring us your best ideas. And there are members of the Republican Study Committee who have brought those good ideas and worked in a very diligent way to ultimately get to a "yes" on this bill with changes that the President has asked us to make that we're going to make in the bill.

And with that, I want to lead it off to the Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Mark Walker.

MR. WALKER: Thank you. We're excited about today because it's historic knowing that we're getting a couple of very important things to the steering committee members -- work requirements through the country, and also something what we call "block grants," which allows the states to be empowered. We believe they should be able to hold the reins when it comes to managing their population. We also think this would provide more coverage for the indigent, for those sick, and for those disabled.

So we're excited about it today, and that's why we've come today to celebrate the American Health Care Act and moving forward with a "yes."

THE PRESIDENT: I just want to say that these are folks that were either a "no" or a "maybe." And we had a nice meeting, and we've been talking all during the night. This didn’t just happen over the last 20 minutes. This has been going all night long.

And we are doing some incredible things. I want everyone to know I'm 100 percent behind this. I want everybody to know that the press has not been speaking properly about how great this is going to be. They have not been giving it a fair chance. The press is -- as you know, I call it the "fake news." This is going to be great for people. I watch -- I say, that's not the bill we're passing. And I also want everybody to know that all of these "nos," or potential "nos," are all "yeses." Every single person sitting in this room is now a "yes."

And we made certain changes, and, frankly, little -- although the block grant is very important, because I want the states to get the money and to run their program, if they want to run it, because they can do it better than the federal government. They're better-equipped than the federal government.

They also want people to know that Obamacare is dead; it's a dead healthcare plan. It's not even a healthcare plan, frankly. And I watched the architect of the plan -- yesterday I watched the old clip where he said the American people are stupid to have voted for it. I watched Bill Clinton saying, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. And only because everyone knows it's on its last dying feat, the fake news is trying to say good things about it -- the fake media. And there is no good news about Obamacare. Obamacare is dead. And unless we gave it massive subsidies in a year from now or six months from now, it's not even going to be here. So when they say, "Oh, more people on the plan," there's not going to be any people on the plan.

I was in Tennessee -- I was just telling the folks -- and half of the state has no insurance company, and the other half is going to lose the insurance company. The people don’t know what to do. It's a disaster. Obamacare is dead. Nothing to do with these people. Nothing to do with me. It's on respirator and it's just about ready to implode.

Now, we could wait for six months or a year and let it happen. It's not the right thing to do for the people. This is a great plan. This is going to be fantastic. You're going to have bidding at the one level by insurance companies. And remember this -- remember this: Those lines are going to come out, you're going to have bidding by insurance companies like you've never seen before. Plans are going to come out like nobody has ever seen befo
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