Portman gets in heated clash with McConnell on ObamaCare repeal: report

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) reportedly got into a heated argument this week over the Senate GOP’s plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

During a meeting earlier this week, the two got into a debate over Medicaid, according to Politico. The majority leader, who has been trying to convince Republican skeptics to come around on the bill, said Portman was in favor of Medicaid cuts when he led the Office of Management and Budget under then-President George W. Bush.

“As OMB director, you backed entitlement reform,” McConnell said during the conversation, according to multiple GOP sources.

{mosads}

“The leadership has overreached on this bill,” Portman, who supported individual spending caps for Medicaid, responded.

Senate leadership earlier this week decided to delay a procedural vote on its healthcare bill when it became clear the proposal lacked the votes for passage.

The issue of Medicaid has become a big threat to the GOP’s healthcare overhaul.

Deep cuts to the social safety net have led to a revolt from centrist GOP senators backed up by their home-state governors, who accepted federal funding under the Affordable Care Act to expand their Medicaid rolls.

They are worried that the Senate bill’s unraveling of that expansion would leave millions of people without health insurance, a belief bolstered by a nonpartisan budget analysis that found 22 million more people would be uninsured in the bill’s first decade as law.

Senate leadership is working under a tight time frame, aiming to wrap up negotiations by the end of this week and then send a revised version of the bill for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score over the weeklong recess.

But there’s deep skepticism that can happen by Friday.