Congressional Republicans emerged from a retreat this weekaimed at forging agreement on how to repeal and replace Obamacarewith little new clarity on the details.

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No precise plan has emerged because “we are still developingwhat this thing is going to look like,” Senator Jim Risch of Idahotold reporters Thursday.

Republicans tried to put a happy face on their meetings, butthey made little tangible progress. The chairman of the tax-writingHouse Ways and Means Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas, said "We’rejust working really productively right now so no timetable’s beenset."

President Donald Trump arrived to tell Republicans inperson that "repealing and replacing Obamacare" was his toplegislative priority, but several lawmakers were frustrated thatthe closed-door sessions provided no new specifics on the path to arepeal bill or the content of a replacement.

That included the most anticipated session of the three-daypolicy retreat, titled "Keeping Our Promise On Health Care," whichwas led by several House and Senate committee chairmen and AndrewBremberg, a top White House official.

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Representative Chris Collins of New York, an early Trump backer,insisted that Republicans are getting closer together.

"We got folks that want to go 60 miles an hour. We have folksthat want to go 80 miles an hour. And some of these folks now wantto go 100 miles an hour," Collins said. "That’s our differences.But we’re all driving down the same road."

Missed deadline

Republicans adopted a budget resolution earlier this month thatset a target of Friday to deliver a repeal plan. But on Thursday,GOP leaders were signaling a shift to a slower, more careful pacein undoing and replacing President Barack Obama’s signaturelegislative achievement.

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House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters at the retreat inPhiladelphia that Republicans could "make good" by August ondevising aspects of the party’s health-care promise and other toppolicies they campaigned on in 2016, such as a tax overhaul. But healso stopped short of promising completion of anything byAugust.

"We don’t want to set arbitrary deadlines on things," he said."We want to get things right. We want to get them done the rightway. We want to move quickly, but we want to get things right."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Ryan had laid out a"a game plan through the August recess of what we want to try andaccomplish," and that "I intend to stick to the plan and make asmuch progress as we can."

QuickTake Q&A: What Obamacare repeal could mean forMedicaid

As for Trump, he too offered no details in a speech toRepublicans Thursday.

"It’s a disaster," Trump said of Obamacare. He said he’d talkedto Ryan and others about not doing anything for two years, as a wayto get Democrats on board with adopting a new national health careplan. "But we have no choice. We want to get something done and getit done right," he said.

The details are where Republicans are getting hung up. Rischsaid there isn’t any agreement yet, for instance, on one of thetoughest topics: whether to keep Obamacare’s taxes and otherrevenue streams.

With such details undecided, he called the push to finishpromises to repeal and replace in the next couple of months"aspirational."

"They know how difficult it’s going to be to resolve thisObamacare thing," he said.

Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, the National RepublicanCongressional Committee chairman, said more details on thehealth-care strategy can be expected in the "next few weeks,"though he also was among those who said Republicans didn’t achieveconsensus on any specific provisions during the Thursday meeting.

‘It’s incredibly complex’

Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson said he’s long believedthat fixing Obamacare is a complicated process and “we have totransition to a system that actually works. It’s incrediblycomplex."

Related: GOP senators appeal to Trump, Dems in ACAbill

”Obamacare has caused a lot of damage, that’s our firstpriority, repair that damage,” he said.

In the closed-door Obamacare session, two lawmakers said theirquestions about potential ideas -- and their costs -- only promptedreplies that those hadn’t been analyzed by congressionalauditors.

Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who chairs the Senate’s healthpanel, did tell fellow Republicans that the biggest challenge forRepublicans to navigate in shifting from Obamacare to a new plan isthe 4 percent of Americans who have obtained coverage on theexchanges.

Potential tax credit

But they couldn’t tell members yet what a potential tax creditin a Republican plan may look like; give specifics of the impact ofany Medicaid expansion plan for the states; or discuss anyantitrust implications for insurance carriers in a Republican plan.Leaders did say aspects like health savings accounts and assignedrisk pools might be elements tackled in a reconciliation bill.

Next week, Congress will hold hearings on several major policyissues that need to be addressed in any repeal and replacescenario. Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee willhold two hearings on strengthening Medicaid and prioritizing themost vulnerable in the federal-state shared health program for thepoor. Many governors who expanded Medicaid under Obamacare,including some Republicans, have made it a priority to protectthose that could lose coverage under a repeal and defend the extrafunds they’ve received for the program in their states.

That panel will also look at several bills that aim to loweryounger consumers’ premiums by allowing insurers to charge olderAmericans more, ensure patients with pre-existing conditions aren’tdenied coverage and tighten enrollment periods.

The Senate health committee also plans to hold a hearing onstabilizing the individual health insurance market, which tends tobe the focus of Obamacare criticism as insurers have dropped out ofthe market and premiums have risen.

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