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GOP gives up on latest Obamacare repeal
Bid short of votes; leaders not giving up on ACA repeal
Republican leaders say push for change will continue.
WASHINGTON — Members of Congress searched for a way forward on health care legislation Tuesday, but as they did, the wreckage of the latest Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act continued to threaten to block the way for bipartisan progress.
Senate Republicans, emerging from their weekly policy lunch Tuesday, said they would not move ahead with a vote on the most recent repeal legislation, sponsored by Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The public opposition from three Republican senators — John McCain of Arizona, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine — had doomed that bill to defeat.
“We’re not going to be able to do that this week,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. But, he added, “we haven’t given up on changing the American health care system.”
McConnell, Graham and other leading Republicans insisted the repeal effort would be revived later, likely next year.
“We’re going to fulfill our promise,” Graham said. “It took 18 months to pass Obamacare. It’s going to take a while to repeal it.”
President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly expressed frustration with the GOP failure to repeal and replace the health care law, responded tersely when reporters asked him what would happen next.
“It will happen,” he said, as he landed in New York for a high-dollar Republican fundraising dinner.
Even as the talk of repeal continued, however, a key Republican committee chair said late Tuesday that he would seek to resume negotiations with Democrats on a more limited bipartisan package.
Congress faces at least two pressing deadlines: Federal money for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, a politically popular program that provides health coverage to some 9 million children, expires Saturday. Some states, which administer the program, have sufficient reserves to continue coverage for a significant time, but others will begin to run out of money within weeks.
And premiums for Obamacare plans for next year need to be finalized this week, with insurers not knowing whether the federal government will continue payments that help make costs affordable.
Lawmakers have worked on bipartisan solutions for both problems, but it remained unclear Tuesday whether members of the Republican majority felt they could proceed on measures that many conservatives see as bailouts of a law they despise.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., reiterated Democrats’ offer to “roll up our sleeves and work to make the health care system better.”
“The Cassidy-Graham bill would have been a health care disaster, and the American people saw it,” Schumer said. “We hope that the Republicans don’t come back to this bill.”
Several Republicans blamed defeat on the rushed and secretive process as they scrambled to meet a Sept. 30 deadline with just one public hearing and said that a more thorough debate would produce legislation that could win support.
“We ran out of time,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. “I’m looking forward to a better process. We take the time, I think we’ll have success.”
In the House, which passed its own health care bill earlier this year, conservatives also refused to give up.
Rep. Mark Meadows, RN.C., said Tuesday that Republicans could try again in a matter of months, reviving special budget rules that allow for majority passage in the Senate after Congress dispatches with tax reform. That would likely push the health care debate into next spring, during the election year.
Others suggested Congress should abandon its partisan approach and resume negotiations to stabilize the system and the other federal health programs at risk of expiring.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the panel’s senior Democrat, had been closing in on a compromise earlier this month to extend CHIP funding for five years. But committee staff were pulled away to deal with the GOP repeal push.
On Monday evening, as his committee wrapped up a marathon hearing on the Graham-Cassidy repeal proposal, Hatch expressed a desire to get back to the CHIP bill.
Even more uncertain is the fate of a separate bipartisan effort to stabilize health insurance markets that have been buffeted by uncertainty over the fate of the health care law and continued threats by the Trump administration to undermine the markets the law created.
Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and the committee’s senior Democrat, Patty Murray, D-Wash., held four hearings earlier this month and were talking about a package of fixes that were broadly supported by state regulators, a bipartisan group of governors, insurers and others who work in health care.