Bill lobbying blitz now targets Senate

WASHINGTON — The pitched battle to kill or fix the GOP’s Obamacare replacement bill now moves to the Senate, where patient advocacy and health care groups are vowing to keep up the pressure on lawmakers while seeking a more substantive debate on the bill’s controversial policies.

While the fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act has centered on the House of Representatives, these advocacy groups have been in discussions with Senate staff all year.

Those talks will only intensify as the battle evolves in the upper chamber.

“The Senate clearly is a different beast than the House,” said Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association. “The staff in all the Senate offices have greater knowledge about how health care works.”

For groups like the American lung, heart and diabetes associations, whose complicated missions require complicated advocacy, an informed listener only helps their case.

“We hope the Senate will move slowly and deliberately,” Billings said. “We hope there’ll be an opportunity for organizations to actually engage on substance. We weren’t afforded that conversation in the House process.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., plans to bring the bill to the floor through a budget procedure known as reconciliation that requires a simple majority and would bypass Democratic attempts to filibuster.

Paul Melmeyer, director of federal policy at the National Organization of Rare Diseases, said his organization wants to be helpful to Senate Republicans as they begin efforts to rewrite or replace the house measure.

Two Republican senators must vote against the repeal legislation to defeat it.

Melmeyer said his group wants to work the middle of the debate.

“We’re not in the camp that says absolutely nothing needs to be done. Nor are we in the camp that says we should throw it all out entirely,” Melmeyer said. “We think there’s absolutely a middle ground” for compromise.