Trump healthcare bill collapses
WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 legislation strongly backed by US President Donald Trump.
The announcements from Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas left the Republican Party’s and Trump’s long-promised efforts to get rid of former US president Barack Obama’s health care legislation in tatters. Next steps, if any, were not immediately clear.
Lee and Moran both said they could not support Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s legislation in its current form.
They joined GOP Senators 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 of even bring- ing the bill to a vote in the 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.
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.
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 in the first place.
The Senate bill eliminated mandates and taxes under Obamacare, and unraveled a Medicaid expansion.