GOP Scrambles After Scorching Health Care Bill Appraisal

“House Republican leaders plunged into damage control mode Monday after a brutal budgetary assessment of their Obamacare replacement threatened to upend Senate GOP support and armed their critics on the left,” Politico reports.

“Speaker Paul Ryan’s team quickly pinpointed rosier elements of the report by the Congressional Budget Office, from cost savings to lower premiums. But the bottom line — that the number of uninsured Americans will climb by 24 million within a decade — threatened to upend the GOP leadership’s fragile efforts to unite congressional Republicans around the plan.”

Washington Post: “From here, the goal of Ryan and other GOP leaders is basically to convince already-skeptical Republicans that the big ’24 million’ figure is pie in the sky — not a real number and nowhere close to where it will be in reality. It simply cannot be.”

Ed Kilgore: “Perhaps Republicans will regroup overnight and come up with more convincing responses. Or maybe they will respond to the mushroom cloud of this CBO report simply by going nuclear on the source.”