WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and his top health official praised House Republicans’ proposed health-care legislation Tuesday, even as surging conservative opposition complicated party leaders’ drive to sell the proposal to lawmakers and the public.
Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning, lauding “our wonderful new Healthcare Bill.” Shortly afterward, Health Secretary Tom Price wrote to the chairmen of the two House committees that created the measures, saying “they align with the president’s goal of rescuing Americans from the failures of the Affordable Care Act,” former President Barack Obama’s signature 2010 law.
Yet by lunchtime, conservative lawmakers and others were criticizing the bill, underscoring the challenge Republicans face in pushing one of their top priorities to passage.
In the first official, albeit partial, measurement to emerge of the bill’s financial impact, Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated it would cut more than 20 taxes imposed by Obama’s law at a cost of nearly $600 billion over a decade. The estimate did not include the cost of the tax credits that the new measure proposes to help people buy coverage.
Republicans say they’ve not yet received an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office of the bill’s overall cost or of the number of people it would cover.
“What Obamacare did was make insurance affordable, but care impossible to actually afford,” White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney said on NBC’s “Today Show.” ”The deductibles were simply too high. So people could say they have coverage but they couldn’t actually get the medical care they needed when they get sick.”
Affordable Care Act insurance plans did typically come with high deductibles, but the law also provided cost-sharing subsidies to people with modest incomes. Those subsidies could be eliminated under the Republican plan, and it’s unclear how high the deductibles would be under the new approach.
The plan would remove the mandated coverage aspects of the Affordable Care Act in favor of age-based tax incentives that would phase out for higher-earning people.
In another feature the measure would block for one year federal payments to Planned Parenthood, the women’s health organization long opposed by many Republicans because it provides abortions.
House committees planned to begin voting on the legislation Wednesday, capping seven years of GOP vows to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
In his letter, Health Secretary Price commended GOP plans to provide millions of Americans with a refundable tax credit — meaning even people without tax liability would receive the assistance. Congressional conservatives have opposed a refundable credit, saying it would create a new entitlement program the government cannot afford.

“It is a missed opportunity and a step in the wrong direction,” said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, one of three conservative senators who’ve criticized GOP leaders for not aggressively repealing Obama’s law. Lee said it was unknown if the bill would make health care more affordable.
Conservative groups like Heritage Action for America and the Club for Growth also criticized the proposed measure. Club for Growth President David McIntosh called the measure a “warmed-over substitute for government-run health care.”
Republicans say their solutions would make Medicaid more cost-efficient without punishing the poor and disabled, while spurring private insurers to offer attractive products for the estimated 20 million consumers in the market for individual policies.
Democrats say the bill would make many people uninsured, shifting costs to states and hospital systems that act as providers of last resort. Individual policyholders might be able to find low-premium plans, only to be exposed to higher deductibles and copayments.
Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia opted to expand Medicaid coverage under the Obama-era law to an estimated 11 million people. Around half those states have GOP governors, who are largely reluctant to see that spending curtailed.
In a last-minute change to satisfy conservative lawmakers, businesses and unions, Republicans dropped a plan pushed by Ryan to impose a first-ever tax on the most generous employer-provided health plans. Instead, a similar tax imposed by Obama’s law on expensive plans set to take effect in 2020 would now begin in 2025.
Popular consumer protections in the Obama law would be retained, such as insurance safeguards for people with pre-existing medical problems, and parents’ ability to keep young adult children on their insurance until age 26.
To prod healthier people to buy policies, insurers would boost premiums by 30 percent for consumers who let insurance lapse.