WASHINGTON (AP) — In a gamble with monumental political stakes, Republicans set course for a climactic House vote on their health care overhaul after President Donald Trump claimed he was finished negotiating with GOP holdouts and determined to pursue the rest of his agenda, win or lose. 
 
 House Speaker Paul Ryan set the showdown for Friday, following a nighttime Capitol meeting at which top White House officials told GOP lawmakers that Trump had decided the time for talk was over. 
 
 "We have been promising the American people that we will repeal and replace this broken law because it's collapsing and it's failing families. And tomorrow we're proceeding," Ryan tersely told reporters after scheduling what loomed as the most momentous vote to date for Trump and for the Wisconsin Republican's own speakership. 
 
 In an embarrassing and stinging setback hours earlier, leaders abruptly postponed the vote because a rebellion by conservatives and moderates would have doomed the measure. They'd hoped for a roll call Thursday, which marked the seventh anniversary of President Barack Obama's enactment of his landmark health care statute that Republicans have vowed ever since to annul. 
 
 There was no evidence that leaders had nailed down sufficient support to prevail, nor that their decision to charge ahead was a feint and that they'd delay again if necessary. But they seemed to be calculating that at crunch time, enough dissidents would decide against sabotaging the bill, Trump's young presidency and the House GOP leadership's ability to set the agenda, with a single, crushing defeat. 
 
 "The president has said he wants the vote tomorrow," White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney told the lawmakers, according to Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., a Trump ally. "If for any reason it goes down, we're just going to move forward with additional parts of his agenda. This is our moment in time." 
 
 Even if they prevail, Republicans face an uphill climb in the Senate, where conservatives and moderates are also threatening to sink it. 
 
 The GOP bill eliminates the Obama statute's unpopular fines on those who do not obtain coverage and the often generous subsidies for those who purchase insurance. 
 
 Instead, consumers would face a 30 percent premium penalty if they let coverage lapse. Republican tax credits would be based on age, not income. The bill would also end Obama's Medicaid expansion and trim future federal financing for the federal-state program and let states impose work requirements on some of its 70 million beneficiaries. 
 
 In a bid to coax support from conservatives, House leaders proposed a fresh amendment — to be voted on Friday — repealing Obama's requirement that insurers cover 10 specified services like maternity and mental health care. Conservatives have demanded the removal of those and other conditions the law imposes on insurers, arguing they drive premiums skyward. 
 
 Many moderates are opposed because they say the GOP bill would leave many voters uninsured. Medical associations, consumer groups and hospitals are opposed or voicing misgivings, and some Republican governors say the bill cuts Medicaid too deeply and would leave many low-income people uncovered. 
 
 Republicans can lose only 22 votes in the face of united Democratic opposition. A tally by The Associated Press found at least 32 "no" votes, but the figure was subject to fluctuation amid frantic GOP lobbying. 
 
 Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., head of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said he remained a "no" but didn't answer when asked whether the group still had enough votes to kill the legislation. He'd long said caucus opposition alone would defeat it without changes. 
 
 One member of that group, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., responded indirectly when asked if his opposition had changed. 
 
 "Everybody asked us to take a moment and reflect. Well, we'll reflect," he said. 
 
 Other foes said they'd not flipped. These included moderate Reps. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Dan Donovan of New York and Leonard Lance of New Jersey, plus conservative Walter Jones of North Carolina, who had his own words of warning. 
 
 "He's there for three-and-a-half more years," Jones said of Trump. "He better be careful. He's got a lot of issues coming." 
 
 The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said changes Republican leaders had proposed before Thursday to win votes had cut the legislation's deficit reduction by more than half, to $150 billion over the next decade. But it would still result in 24 million more uninsured people in a decade. 
 
 Obama's law increased coverage through subsidized private insurance for people who don't have access to workplace plans, and a state option to expand Medicaid for low-income residents. More than 20 million people gained coverage since the law was passed in 2010. 
 
 Many who purchase individual health insurance and make too much to qualify for the law's tax credits have seen their premiums jump and their choices diminished. 
 
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 Associated Press writers Matt Daly, Kevin Freking, Mary Clare Jalonick, Richard Lardner, Stephen Ohlemacher, Vivian Salama, Ken Thomas and Erica Werner contributed to this report. ||||| House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), left, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) published op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post on Wednesday calling for President Obama to come to the negotiating table — but neither mentioned the Affordable Care Act as an item to be discussed. (JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS) 
 
 Key GOP figures on Wednesday sent their clearest signals that they are abandoning their bid to immediately stop the federal health-care law — the issue that forced the government to shut down — and are scrambling for a fallback strategy. 
 
 Republican Party leaders, activists and donors now widely acknowledge that the effort to kill President Obama’s signature initiative by hitting the brakes on the government has been a failure. The law has largely disappeared from their calculus as they look for a way out of the impasse over the shutdown and for a way to avoid a possible default on U.S. debt. 
 
 Instead, they are regrouping for a longer battle over the health-care law. They also are trying to refocus the upcoming debt-ceiling showdown on fiscal issues, including entitlements and tax reform. 
 
 The strategy to defund the Affordable Care Act “needed a Plan B, and its authors, if they had one, didn’t share what it was,” said Heather R. Higgins, head of the Independent Women’s Forum and founder of a coalition of conservative groups seeking repeal of the health-care law. 
 
 The push to defund the legislation has cost Republicans politically. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that only 28 percent of Americans view the Republican Party favorably — down 10 percentage points since September, and the lowest number for either party since Gallup began asking the question in 1992. 
 
 View Graphic How the shutdown affects departments 
 
 Democrats took a smaller hit in the survey, with 43 percent of respondents viewing Obama’s party favorably, down four percentage points from last month. 
 
 Some Republicans are aiming harsh recriminations toward those who had vigorously advocated linking the funding needed to keep the government operating to the drive to stop the health-care law. Freshman Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who has become the face of that strategy, is the chief target of such criticism from within GOP ranks. 
 
 “I think it was very possible for us to delay the implementation of Obamacare for a year until Cruz came along and crashed and burned,” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist said. 
 
 But Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said: “The American people remain behind the defund effort. Americans deserve negotiations. They don’t want Obamacare. Public opinion is behind this, and that should be enough for Democrats to come to the table and provide relief for all Americans.” 
 
 House Republican leaders — who had been backed into the shutdown strategy by demands from Cruz and tea party forces — have been trying to recalibrate since the shutdown began Oct. 1. 
 
 The latest signs of the shift came in editorial columns Wednesday by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in The Washington Post and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in the Wall Street Journal. 
 
 Both implored Obama to negotiate the debt ceiling — but, tellingly, neither mentioned the health-care law as an item to be discussed. Instead, they focused on entitlements, and Ryan wrote that there are many potential areas of agreement between Obama and the Republicans. 
 
 The president has expressed a willingness to negotiate on long-term fiscal problems, but only if Republicans first vote to reopen the government and remove the threat of a federal default. 
 
 On Tuesday, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) also made no mention of the health-care law when he delivered a statement on the shutdown and the Oct. 17 deadline to raise the debt ceiling. 
 
 Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck insisted that Republicans have not given up on their demand that concessions on the health-care legislation be part of any deal to reopen the government. He acknowledged, however, that the demand has shifted from defunding the law — the original rallying cry — to a much narrower goal of delaying a requirement that uninsured individuals obtain coverage. 
 
 Some of the most influential players in the conservative movement also were taking pains Wednesday to maintain their distance from the shutdown strategy, while reaffirming their opposition to Obamacare. 
 
 The chief lobbyist for Koch Industries sent a letter to Capitol Hill offices saying the company’s owners — heavyweight conservative donors Charles and David Koch — have never publicly supported the defund strategy, despite assertions by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and other Democrats to the contrary. 
 
 “Koch believes that Obamacare will increase deficits, lead to an overall lowering of the standard of health care in America, and raise taxes,” Koch lobbyist Philip Ellender wrote. “However, Koch has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the [spending bill needed to keep the government open] to defunding Obamacare nor have we lobbied on legislative provisions defunding Obamacare.” 
 
 One major Koch-funded organization, Americans for Prosperity, has emphasized potential problems with the law but has kept its distance from efforts to defund it and from the shutdown strategy. 
 
 “We see this as a long-term effort,” said Tim Phillips, executive director of the group, which plans to resume a $6 million ad campaign against the law. “We think this effort continues into the fall of 2014 and even beyond.” 
 
 The Affordable Care Act’s online insurance exchanges have gotten off to a rocky start this month, and polls show the law remains unpopular. 
 
 Many GOP pollsters and strategists sharply criticized the push to defund the legislation as it gathered steam this summer, preferring a less confrontational approach that would build on public doubts about the law and focus on delaying its implementation. 
 
 The idea was that flaws in the legislation would become more apparent over time and that the continuing debate would motivate conservatives to vote in the 2014 midterm elections. 
 
 Now that plan is in tatters, and party and movement leaders are trying to salvage something from what is widely acknowledged to be a politically disastrous few weeks. Instead, many strategists say, the stumbling rollout of the law has been overshadowed by the shutdown and a perception that Republicans have overreached. 
 
 “There is a strong sense of a missed opportunity,” Norquist said. ||||| They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Why is it that the Republicans in Congress seem so determined to prove this maxim? 
 
 Let’s start with the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. The exchanges that are at the heart of Obamacare — making it possible for people who are currently uninsured to buy health care — open for business on Tuesday. Ever since the Republicans took control of the House, they have held vote after vote to roll back the law, even while ignoring important business like, say, fixing the Postal Service. I think it’s been 43 times in all — votes that have been utterly pointless, in that the Senate is still run by Democrats, and the law is President Obama ’s signature achievement, and there’s no way on God’s green earth it will be repealed. 
 
 But never mind. As Oct. 1 has neared — the date both Obamacare kicks in and the government needs to be funded — Republicans moved to another tactic, which was every bit as hopeless. They began demanding that Obamacare be reversed — or at least delayed — as part of any deal to keep the government running. (At one point they had a lengthy wish list that was so implausible it was almost laugh-out-loud funny.) 
 
 But to the surprise of absolutely no one, when Republicans added the anti-Obamacare language to the “ continuing resolution ” designed to finance the government (for all of six weeks!), the Senate quickly rejected the House bill and insisted instead on a continuing resolution that did nothing but what it was supposed to do: fund the government. Republicans, meanwhile, would not back away from their demand that the “C.R.” had to be linked to a delay in Obamacare. 
 
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 “I see almost no hope of avoiding a government shutdown,” Representative Jim Cooper , a conservative Democrat from Nashville , told me Monday afternoon. It’s possible, of course, that House Republicans will pass a continuing resolution in the wee small hours, after this column has gone to bed. But it’s very unlikely. 
 
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 And that’s the second way in which Republican strategy seems to have run off the rails. This constant brinkmanship, which Republicans bring on with their unrealistic demands and deadlines, consistently redounds against them. It makes you wonder what they are trying to accomplish.
– House Republicans announced yesterday that they'd only vote to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling if they could repeal or delay ObamaCare with the same votes. That's got pundits talking today, and pretty much none of those people think it's a good strategy. Here's what they're saying: At the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove reveals Crossroads polling that shows that, while independent voters widely oppose ObamaCare, they oppose the GOP's repeal-or-shutdown tactics just as strongly. Rove also argues that a shutdown today "would have much worse fallout" than the 1995 shutdown, politically and otherwise. Besides, the repeal would need enough votes to clear the Senate and override a presidential veto. "No sentient being believes this will happen." Republicans who prefer gradually delaying and dismantling the law are winning the argument, argues Peter Roff at US News and World Report, and with good reason: "They have the president on their side." Obama's team "has made such a hash of the implementation phase of ObamaCare that 'delay' is already a reality," and it now seems inevitable to him that the whole law will "come tumbling down" and be replaced with something else. But some Republicans—displaying "all the rationality of a Justin Bieber fan riot"—argue that they must act quickly, before Americans taste ObamaCare's sweet, sweet subsidies. The law will be "worse than an invasion of giant zombies swinging nuclear-tipped crocodiles!" quips Gail Collins at the New York Times, and Americans "are going to love it so much they will never have the self-control necessary to give it up." It's not just bad politics, it's morally wrong, argues EJ Dionne at the Washington Post. "There is a thread running through the kamikaze caucus," he writes. "Almost everything it is doing is designed to keep government from acting against inequality." ObamaCare, which would help 25 million Americans get insurance "is part of this larger story."