Obamacare vote failure taught me a lot about loyalty, says Trump

Donald Trump has claimed he learned a lot following his failure to secure support on his bill to replace Obamacare as Democrats described him as "incompetent".

The House of Representatives cancelled a planned vote on the bill on Friday (24 March) after it became clear there was not enough support within the GOP for it to pass.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told Reuters the healthcare bill had failed "because of two traits that have plagued the Trump presidency since he took office: incompetence and broken promises".

The president, however, placed the blame at the feet of the Democrats - despite the fact that his own party controls both the House and the Senate. It is believed he would have been at least 25 votes short of what he needed and concluded that it would be less damaging to pull the vote than to have the bill voted down.

"We learned a lot about loyalty," said Trump. "We learned a lot about the vote-getting process.

"We were just probably anywhere from 10 to 15 votes short," he added. "With no Democrat support we couldn't quite get there."

Trump's appeal to the House Freedom Caucus, which reportedly accounted for 25 people unconvinced by the proposed healthcare bill, fell on deaf ears as caucus members insisted they would not pass the bill as it stood.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer told The Wall Street Journal: "Part of it is trying to figure out as you go down this path who you can rely on and who's going to keep your word.

"Who's going to negotiate in good faith? We dealt with over 120 members of Congress and you learn a little about some of these individuals... you just learn a lot about who you can count on and who you can't," he added.

And the president's promise that a failure to vote in favour of his healthcare plan would mean Obamacare remained in place appeared to be no empty threat, as House Speaker Paul Ryan confirmed the plans for healthcare reform had stalled.

"We are going to be living with ObamaCare for the foreseeable future," Ryan said.

"I spoke to the president a little while ago and I told him the best thing I think to do was to pull this bill and he agreed with that. I will not sugar coat this, this is a disappointing day for us. Doing big things is hard."