2 more senators renounce support for health bill
Bill likely dead, leaving future of GOP’s efforts to repeal Obamacare uncertain
WASHINGTON - The latest GOP effort to repeal and replace “Obamacare” was fatally wounded in the Senate Monday night when two more Republican senators announced their opposition to the legislation strongly backed by President Donald Trump.
The announcements from Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas left the Republican Party’s long-promised efforts to get rid of President Barack Obama’s health care legislation reeling. Next steps, if any, were not immediately clear.
And Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin angrily indicated earlier Monday he might oppose his party’s health care bill.
Johnson said moderate GOP senators “basically
confirmed” to him that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.) assured them last week that Medicaid cuts planned by the legislation would “never happen” because they are too far in the future.
“It’s from my standpoint a pretty serious breach of trust, those comments,” Johnson, a conservative re-elected last year, told reporters.
Trump on Monday night called on Republicans to repeal Obamacare and “start from a clean slate.”
Lee and Moran both said they could not support McConnell’s legislation in its current form. They joined GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, both of whom announced their opposition right after McConnell released the bill last Thursday.
McConnell is now at least two votes short in the closely divided Senate and may have to go back to the drawing board or even begin to negotiate with Democrats, a prospect he’s threatened but resisted so far. Or he could abandon the health care effort, which has proven more difficult than many Republicans envisioned after campaigning on the issue for years, and move on to tax legislation, a bigger priority for Trump.
McConnell’s bill “fails to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address healthcare’s rising costs. For the same reasons I could not support the previous version of this bill, I cannot support this one,” said Moran.
Lee said, “In addition to not repealing all of the Obamacare taxes, it doesn’t go far enough in lowering premiums for middle class families; nor does it create enough free space from the most costly Obamacare regulations.”
It was the second straight failure for McConnell, who had to cancel a vote on an earlier version of the bill last month when defeat became inevitable.
Trump had kept his distance from the Senate process, but Monday night’s development was a major blow for him, too, as the president failed to rally support for what has been the GOP’s trademark issue for seven years — ever since Obama and the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. Republicans won the White House and full control of Congress in large part on the basis of their promises to repeal and replace “Obamacare,” but have struggled to overcome their deep internal divisions and deliver.
The Senate bill, like an earlier version that barely passed the House, eliminated mandates and taxes under Obamacare, and unraveled an expansion of the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled. But for conservatives like Lee and Paul it didn’t go far enough in delivering on Republican Party promises to undo Obama’s law.
Conservative support for the legislation has hinged in part on the measure’s planned $772 billion in 10-year cuts to Medicaid, the federalstate health insurance program for the poor, disabled and nursing home patients. But only $35 billion of those cuts occur over the next two years.