WASHINGTON—There’s a story Hillary Clinton tells in her memoir.

Bill Clinton had just put her in charge of reforming America’s health-care system, and their pal, New York governor Mario Cuomo, was visiting the White House. Cuomo had a question she didn’t understand.

What had she done to anger her husband so much that he gave her a job like that?

“I heard the warnings,” Clinton wrote in Living History a decade later, “but I didn’t fully realize the magnitude of what we were undertaking.”

Neither, it appears, was Donald Trump prepared for his own overhaul attempt. And Trump, unlike the Clintons, is trying to take insurance away from people — while also dealing with the 2017 edition of the Republican Party.

The president’s preferred plan to replace Obamacare has landed with a thud. Its savagers include not only the usual Democratic suspects but conservative lobby groups and pundits. Even Breitbart, the website that serves up a reliable diet of pro-Trump pablum, has come out scathingly against.

What Trump is trying would be difficult enough in any era: never in American history has Congress voted to eliminate a massive social program that was supposed to be lasting. The task is significantly more challenging when dozens of his own party’s elected officials are hard-line ideologues demanding complete ideological purity.

From the left, Trump and the bill’s congressional backers are being deluged with complaints that they will force millions of poor and middle-income people to lose the coverage they gained under Obamacare. From the right, they are being swamped by criticism that they are not eradicating every last scrap of Obamacare.

And it is not only partisans shouting. The bill is being opposed by almost every important independent expert and outside lobby group, the American Hospital Association and American Medical Association among others.

Speaking during a White House meeting with the House Deputy Whip team, U.S. President Donald Trump said Obamacare is 'collapsing,' and added he's 'proud' to support the House GOP health care bill and hopes Congress will pass it very quickly.

Trump has taken quick ownership of the House plan, calling it “wonderful.” But it represents a severe break of his pre-inauguration promise of “insurance for everybody,” and it poses major risk to him either way.

If Trump fails at his first attempt at high-profile legislation, his presidency is weakened, as Bill Clinton’s was. (Clinton won re-election, of course, but the Democrats were hammered in the 1994 mid-terms.) If he gets a bill passed, the supposed victory might well contribute to future electoral defeats.

“The mover on health care loses,” James Carville, the former Bill Clinton strategist, told the New York Times in January. “To do something is to lose.”

Barack Obama’s Democrats were trounced in congressional and state elections after he signed the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans’ American Health Care Act, which Democrats are attempting to brand as Trumpcare, would likely hurt millions of the same voters who fuelled Trump’s rise: rural residents making less than $75,000 per year.

The plan puts money back in the pockets of young, healthy and wealthy people. But it also includes a hefty tax break for the executives of insurance companies.

This plan eliminates Obamacare’s unpopular “individual mandate,” the requirement that everybody obtain insurance or pay a penalty to the government. To the dismay of conservatives, it creates something in the same ballpark — a “late-enrollment surcharge” people would have to pay to insurers.

Read more:

Trump wants Obamacare killed, and replaced, as soon as possible

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Expect ‘something special’ to replace Obamacare, Trump tells health insurers

Liberals pledge up to $20 million for sexual health funding after Trump cuts

The conservative backlash does not necessarily mean the plan is dead on arrival. Obama’s triumph emerged out of months of haggling with individual Democratic legislators.

The right-wing fury does, however, lay bare the political limits of the Republicans’ ideological position on health care.

The party’s leaders spent seven years united in a promise to rapidly “repeal and replace” a law Trump describes as a catastrophe. But with a plan that retains numerous key elements of Obamacare, Republican power brokers like House Speaker Paul Ryan are essentially acknowledging reality: there is not nearly a big enough constituency for the complete demolition sought by the professed purists of the House Freedom Caucus.

The popularity of Obama’s policy is rising in the absence of Obama. Polls consistently show that the public overwhelmingly prefers a repair of Obamacare’s problems rather than full repeal.

“They’re trying to meet the expectations of the public backlash against Obamacare while dealing with a public that isn’t really ideologically opposed to many of the health-care reforms that the Democrats pushed,” said Stephen Voss, a University of Kentucky political science professor.

“So they offer legislation that mostly nibbles around the edges around Democratic health-care reforms but still gives them the ability to claim credit of having jettisoned Obamacare.”

Kentucky, where Trump is expected to visit on Saturday, is one example of how he is being tugged from all directions.

Obamacare cut the state uninsured rate from 20 per cent to 8 per cent, and many of the residents helped by its expansion of the Medicaid program for low-income people appear to have voted for Trump. The Republican plan would cut funds from the expansion. Meanwhile: Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is opposing the plan not because it goes too far in limiting the expansion but because it does not get rid of the expansion altogether.

“The House leadership Obamacare Lite plan has many problems,” Paul wrote on Twitter. “We should be stopping mandates, taxes and entitlements not keeping them.”

Trump responded with his trademark passive-aggression: “I feel sure that my friend Rand Paul will come along with the new and great health-care program because he knows Obamacare is a disaster!” This time, though, his bluster might not be enough.

Read more about: