for the spending bill that just passed. the president needed to look his base in the eye and say we made progress. me deserves a lot of credit for this initial step. huge defeat he suffered 42 days ago and now he s celebrating. this is in some ways a send off party for the folks who will have to go back to their districts and talk to the constituents. you imagine democrats will flood town halls. some republicans might not want to have town halls. the president sounding bullish. he promised a premiums are going to start to come down. i m not sure when he means they re going to start to come down. and he also said the deductibles will be going down as well. today, you can see the places where democrats can make ads out of this event. laughing and joking and the celebration. you imagine that will end up happening from democrats. democrats still, you know, have a lot of work to do in terms of their messaging.
john king, you see the president, he was very, very happy. this is a he takes deserves a lot of credit because he worked really hard over these past several days to get those final votes to reach 217. and a smile on his face and the nodding as he receives praise and as the others praise the party involved in this, shows how happy he is. very rare, this has passed one chamber of congress and having a rose garden ceremony. this was so important to the president to try to say to rightly say we have passed out of the house a key republican and key trump campaign promise. now his emphasis was trying to put pressure on the senate to act as quickly as possible. that s the giant question, not to be the skunk at the rose garden party. passing something in the house changes the optics in washington and changes the conversation in washington. it changes absolutely nothing in the healthcare of americans who are watching this. it changes nothing today.
choice. how do you care for preexisting conditions when there s no care at all? or you read the paper yesterday and you look at etna pulling out of virginia. or tennessee next year with 16 counties with no care. what about those families that paid into those 23 co-ops that obamacare vaetcreated. 18 have collapses and the only answer the government gives them is a penalty. if you simply look at the facts, more people took the penalty or the exemption than actually signed up for obamacare. i did not run to this office to promote a party. i ran for this office to make this country better. yeah, it would be easy to say no. it would be easy to watch it collapse. but i can t look at those
this has really brought the republican party together. as much as we ve come up with a really incredible healthcare plan, this has brought the republican party together. we re going to get this finished and then we re going as you know, we put our tax plan in. it s a massive tax cut. the biggest tax cut in the history of our country. i used to say the biggest since ronald reagan. now it s bigger than that. also, pure tax reform. so we re going to get that done next. and this really helps it. a lot of people said how come you kept pushing healthcare knowing how tough it is. don t forget, obamacare took 17 months. hillary clinton tried so hard, really valiantly in all fairness, to get healthcare through, didn t happen. we ve really been doing this for eight weeks, if you think about it. and this is a real plan. this is a great plan. we had no support from the other party. so i just want to introduce