Paul Ryan: 'We're going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future'

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) held a news conference on Friday after Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act act known as Obamacare, prior to a vote at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

"I will not sugarcoat this. This is a disappointing day for us," Ryan said at the news conference. "Obamacare is the law of the land, it will remain the law of the land until it's replaced. We are going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future."

Ryan describes that he called Trump on Friday with the previously scheduled 3:30 p.m. vote looming, and told the president he thought "the best thing to do" would be to pull the bill, with which Ryan says the president agreed.

Meetings between President Trump's administration Republican leadership and their more conservative colleagues in the Freedom Caucus were frequent this week, as lawmakers attempted to overcome their ideologic differences over what an Obamacare replacement should like.

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Ryan says this party rift is why the House came "close," to passing the bill, but was unable to follow through.

"There is a block of no votes that we had that is why this didn't have," Speaker Ryan said. "There were a sufficient number of votes that prevented it from passing, and they didn't change their votes."

"We were close. Some of the members of that caucus were voting with us," Ryan added, speaking of the Freedom Caucus, "but not enough were."

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"We were a 10-year opposition party where being against things was easy to do. You just had to be against it," Ryan said. "Now, in three months time, we try to go to a governing party where we actually have to get 216 people to agree with each other on how we do things, and we just quite weren't there today."

Ryan indicated that Republicans will be moving forward with tax reform as their next major policy initiative.

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