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We don’t know what will emerge as President Trump’s plan to replace Obamacare, which he has promised to unveil immediately after the 2020 elections. But he has recently endorsed several proposals, and they could provide clues. Over the last two weeks, he has sought to re-emphasize health care as an issue, after a set of bruising legislative defeats in 2017. He directed the Justice Department not to defend the Affordable Care Act against a legal challenge. And he issued statements and tweets calling for Republicans to become “the party of health care,” at a moment when many of his party’s leaders had hoped to focus on different issues. (Sanger-Katz, 4/5)

Kaiser Health News: Podcast: KHN’s ‘What The Health’ The GOP’s Health Reform Whiplash

President Donald Trump last week insisted that Republicans would move this year to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Or possibly not. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear the GOP Senate did not plan to spend time on the effort as long as the House is controlled by Democrats. So, the president changed his tune. At least for the moment. Meanwhile, states with legislatures and governors that oppose abortion are racing to pass abortion bans and get them to the Supreme Court, where, they hope, the new majority there will overturn or scale back the current right to abortion. (Rovner, 4/4)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi questioned whether a health-care proposal embraced by several Democratic presidential candidates would be too expensive and fail to provide the same coverage as the Affordable Care Act. Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested Thursday that she would rather build on the 2010 law and is yet to be convinced the Medicare-for-all proposal pushed by many liberals would achieve its purported goals. “I’m agnostic. Show me how you think you can get there,” Pelosi said in an interview with The Washington Post. (Kane and Bade, 4/4)