Trump White House Signals It Will Abandon Obamacare Repeal

The Daily Beast reports:

Amid celebration over a massive overhaul of the nation’s tax code, the White House strongly signaled on Wednesday that it was abandoning efforts to roll back what remains of Obamacare.

The president was first to hint as much when he triumphantly declared that Obamacare had been effectively ended by virtue of the tax bill’s inclusion of a repeal of the healthcare law’s individual mandate. The penalty for those individuals who don’t purchase insurance is, indeed, important to Obamacare’s functionality. But Trump’s claim ignored the massive chunks of the law that remain on the books, from the Medicaid expansion to the insurance subsidies, to the regulatory changes on the provider and insurer side.

Nevertheless, the president’s remark sent a signal to others that the White House wasn’t itching for a fight over those remaining Obamacare provisions. And, sure enough, later in the day, White House officials did little to dispute that reading.

“Taxes are our issue. Health care is theirs,” a senior White House aide told The Daily Beast on Wednesday, noting that “the parts of health care we’d be going after”—were they to attempt another run at repeal—were incredibly popular, or at least would prompt a significant enough backlash to make that effort counterproductive during an election year.

Will the leftist Daily Beast be wrong again?