House Speaker Paul Ryan and quite possibly some in popular vote loser Donald Trump's own cabinet team (say, like maybe Ryan's old colleague Tom Price, who is now Secretary of Health and Human Services) seem to be trying to capitalize on Trump's ignorance and hoodwink him into rushing Obamacare repeal. He's somehow come up with the idea that he can't do tax cuts, which is probably a higher priority for him, until health care is done.
Referring to his own enthusiasm for tax reform, Trump explained, “I can’t do it until we do health care, because we have to know what the health care is going to cost and—statutorily—that’s the way it is. So for those people who say, ‘oh, gee, I wish we could do the tax first,’ it just doesn’t work that way. I would like to do the tax first.”
Trump is wrong about this. There is no statutory requirement for him to do health care before he works on tax reform. What’s at issue is simply Paul Ryan’s legislative strategy. Ryan wants to pass a tax reform plan with a party-line vote, which means he needs to use the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Senate filibuster. […]
If Congress wanted to, they could easily reverse this order of operations. Ryan and Trump could set ACA repeal aside and work on a revenue-neutral tax reform plan. Then if it passes, they could consider health issues separately. Ryan doesn’t want to do it that way. And to be clear, that’s him making a choice, not a statutory requirement. But people in Trump’s circle seem to have misinformed him about the sequencing—possibly in order to prevent the president and the speaker from getting into a dispute about it.
Maybe Ryan's big rush to ram repeal through is to get it done before Trump figures this out.