WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump blasted congressional Democrats and “a few Republicans” Tuesday over the collapse of the GOP effort to rewrite the Obama health care law. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a vote on a backup plan simply repealing the statute, but that idea was on the brink of rejection, too.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said they opposed McConnell’s Plan B. If a third GOP senator opposes it — and several are expected to — it would be defeated, and that might send a message to conservative Republicans that it is time to abandon efforts to tear down Obama’s law.
All Senate Democrats are opposed. Trump’s early morning tweet led off a barrage of Republican criticism of Congress over the party’s failure on its flagship legislative priority. For seven years, the GOP has pledged to repeal President Barack Obama’s law.
“Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans.” He added, “As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!”
Two GOP senators — Utah’s Mike Lee and Jerry Moran of Kansas — sealed the measure’s doom late Monday when they announced they would vote “no” in an initial, critical vote that had been expected as soon as next week. That meant that at least four of the 52 GOP senators were ready to block the measure — two more than Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had to spare in the face of unanimous Democratic opposition.
On the Senate floor Tuesday, McConnell conceded that the legislation repealing the 2010 law and replacing it with GOP-preferred programs “will not be successful,” essentially waving a white flag. He said instead, the Senate would vote on legislation dismantling much of Obama’s statute that would take effect in two years, which Republicans say would give Congress time to approve replacement legislation. But such legislation seems unlikely to be approved, with many Republicans concerned the two-year gap would roil insurance markets and produce a political backlash against the GOP.
Moderate Republican Sen. Capito said she’d oppose scuttling Obama’s statute “without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.” She’s criticized the GOP bill’s cuts in Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people that her state relies on heavily.
Another moderate, Susan Collins, also said she’d oppose McConnell’s measure. She said repealing the law without an immediate replacement would produce “great anxiety for individuals” who benefit from Obama’s statute and “cause the insurance markets to go into turmoil.”
This is the second stinging setback on the issue in three weeks for McConnell, whose reputation as a legislative mastermind has been marred as he’s failed to unite his chamber’s Republicans behind a health overhaul package that highlighted jagged divides between conservatives and moderates. In late June, he abandoned an initial package after he lacked enough GOP support to pass.
The episode has also been jarring for Trump, whose intermittent lobbying and nebulous, often contradictory descriptions of what he’s wanted have shown he has limited clout with senators. That despite a determination by Trump, McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to demonstrate that a GOP running the White House and Congress can govern effectively.
McConnell’s failed bill would have left 22 million uninsured by 2026, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a number that many Republicans found unpalatable. But the vetoed 2015 measure would be even worse, the budget office said last January, producing 32 million additional uninsured people by 2026 — figures that seemed likely to drive a stake into that bill’s prospects for passing Congress.
That would seem to leave McConnell with an option he described last month — negotiating with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. That would likely be on a narrower package aimed more at keeping insurers in difficult marketplaces they’re either abandoning or imposing rapidly growing premiums.
“The core of this bill is unworkable,” Schumer said in a statement. He said Republicans “should start from scratch and work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health care system.”
Similar to legislation the House approved in May after its own setbacks, McConnell’s bill would repeal Obama’s tax penalties on people who don’t buy coverage and cut the Medicaid program for the poor, elderly and nursing home residents. It rolled back many of the statute’s requirements for the policies insurers can sell and eliminated many tax increases that raised money for Obama’s expansion to 20 million more people, though it retained the law’s tax boosts on high earners.
Besides Lee and Moran, two other GOP senators had previously declared their opposition to McConnell’s bill: Collins and conservative Rand Paul of Kentucky. And other moderates were wavering and could have been difficult for McConnell and Trump to win over because of the bill’s Medicaid cuts: Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Rob Portman of Ohio, Capito of West Virginia and Dean Heller of Nevada, probably the most endangered Senate Republican in next year’s elections.
The range of objections lodged by the dissident senators underscored the warring viewpoints within his own party that McConnell had to try patching over. Lee complained that the GOP bill didn’t go far enough in rolling back Obama’s robust coverage requirements, while moderates like Collins berated its Medicaid cuts and the millions it would leave without insurance.