Axios

John Cornyn, the #2 Senate Republican, after meeting with some GOP governors, said no one who is currently on Medicaid will lose their coverage. How that squares with repealing Obamacare's Medicaid expansion along with most of the rest of the law is unclear.

When asked if pro-expansion state governors, including Ohio Gov. John Kasich, expressed concern over their constituents losing coverage, Cornyn said: "We're all concerned, but it ain't gonna happen."

What's next: That's a big promise, but it also seems like the only way out of the political mess repealing Medicaid expansion would create. Now the question is how to make good on that promise.

As of tomorrow, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that runs the implementation of Obamacare, will have a new acting director. It's Patrick Conway, currently the head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, the office that runs the cost-savings experiments under Obamacare that have drawn so much ire from physicians — and from Congress.

Andy Slavitt, the current chief of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will step down tomorrow when President Obama leaves office. In a series of tweets Thursday, he praised Conway and said the agency will be in good hands:

Conway will have the responsibility of closing out the last week and a half of Obamacare enrollment, which ends on Jan. 31.

One striking moment in Tom Price's testimony: The part where he wondered aloud why so many Americans still don't have health insurance, even under Obamacare, and what can be done to help them get it. He might start by reading this Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of the 27 million people who are still uninsured.

Republicans on the Hill are taking a close look at an idea they believe could actually expand health coverage: just enroll everyone in a health plan unless they opt out.

Here's a chilling observation from STAT's exit interview with outgoing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden: The Ebola outbreak came closer than anyone knew to running completely out of control.

"[T]ruth be told, we weren't 100 percent sure that we would be able to stop the outbreak," Frieden said. "In Lagos we were days away from Ebola spreading throughout Nigeria, throughout Africa, for months and months and potentially years." If that had happened, he said, the disease itself wouldn't have just killed people — it could have killed more by shutting down health care systems.

"I think that's what's less understood: how close the world was to an abyss," Frieden said.

President-elect Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary testified for nearly four hours before the Senate HELP Committee on Wednesday. In that time, he suggested that the Trump administration wants to cover more people than Obamacare, hinted he might drop his opposition to Medicare negotiating drug prices, and tangled with Democrats over whether he was actually in charge of his stock purchases.

While the committee won't vote on his nomination, Price's testimony reveals more about what he'll do if confirmed — and how that might clash with Trump's public comments.

Read on for some of Price's notable answers:

President-elect Trump talked to Axios yesterday about his "insurance for everybody" comments — and this time, he was back to talking about Obamacare replacement the same way he did in the campaign.

Well, we want people taken care of .... There will be nobody dying on the streets in a Trump administration.

And where Trump was starting to sound like a single-payer guy a few days ago, now he's back to talking about Medicaid block grants. "Whether it's Medicaid block grants or whatever it may be, we have to make sure that people are taken care of," he said.

Between the lines: Trump's latest comments should help settle the big question Republicans, and many health care wonks, had after Trump's Washington Post interview: Is he talking about a different plan than he laid out in the campaign? The answer, it now appears, is no.

If Health and Human Services nominee Tom Price survives the conflict of interest and insider trading charges swirling around him as his confirmation hearings start today, he will soon have the power to eliminate the Obama administration's cost-savings initiatives that have been bitterly opposed by the most powerful players in the health care industry.

Why this will happen and what it means:

• Price opposed the cost control programs while a member of Congress.
• Killing them wouldn't take legislation — he simply has to cancel the Obama team's experiments under the Affordable Care Act aimed at cutting the fees Medicare pays.
• It would be the ignominious end to a central, if not wholly successful, part of Obamacare's strategy to rein in health-care costs.

Although Price declined through a spokesperson to say whether he will scrap the initiatives, his record as a Republican congressman from Georgia makes it clear that he'll do so quickly. In fact, the Obama administration already ended one program because, according to one administration official, it was obvious Price was going to kill it anyway. More details on the scope of the program and what will end below.