Overnight Healthcare: GOP’S repeal-only plan quickly collapses in Senate

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) says she will not support moving forward with a plan to repeal ObamaCare with a delayed replacement, effectively killing the latest legislative gambit from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Murkowski, who had balked at the last version of the ObamaCare bill, said she is a no on the motion to proceed to a repeal-only plan. She is the third Republican senator to take that position.

“No. I said back in January that if we’re going to do a repeal there has to be a replacement. There’s enough chaos and uncertainty already,” she told reporters Tuesday.

With Murkowski’s defection, GOP leaders do not have the votes to move forward to an ObamaCare repeal bill that passed the Senate in 2015, but was vetoed by then-President Obama.

Read more here. 

 

McConnell says ObamaCare repeal vote will come ‘sometime in the near future’

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), though, insisted Tuesday that the Senate will push forward with trying to repeal ObamaCare.

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“Sometime in the near future we’ll have a vote on repealing ObamaCare,” McConnell told reporters after a closed-door caucus lunch.

McConnell acknowledged that his conference does not now have the votes it needs to pass its healthcare bill.

Read more here.

 

How Trump’s repeal push came up short

The Trump administration pushed hard — and ultimately unsuccessfully — to convince reluctant senators and governors to support the Senate GOP’s ObamaCare repeal effort.

Its two top health officials and Vice President Mike Pence became fixtures in closed-door GOP conference meetings on Capitol Hill, along with other key advisors such as Budget director Mick Mulvaney and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

The administration had hoped the policy expertise of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma would be enough to convince holdout senators that the GOP legislation would help their states.

But it didn’t work.

Did the administration do enough to convince senators of the merits of the repeal-and-replace plan?

Read more here.

 

Moderate Republicans, Dems huddle on healthcare

Centrist House Republicans and Democrats huddled on Tuesday and discussed healthcare in the wake of the collapse of Senate GOP efforts to repeal ObamaCare, multiple sources told The Hill.

Members of the GOP’s Tuesday Group and the New Democrat Coalition met in the Capitol, part of a periodic gathering of the two moderate groups. But healthcare dominated the meeting, participants said.

The meeting is part of the “preliminary” discussion taking place between centrists on both sides of the aisle following the implosion of Senate Republicans’ repeal-and-replace legislation, House lawmakers said.

Read more here. 

 

Trump says he’ll ‘let ObamaCare fail’

President Trump on Tuesday said he was disappointed in the Senate’s failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and argued that Republicans should now let the law fail on its own.

In his first on-camera remarks about the stalemate in the Senate, Trump said it “will be a lot easier” to allow ObamaCare to falter on its own.

“I think we’re probably in that position where we’ll let ObamaCare fail,” he told reporters in the Roosevelt Room. “We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let ObamaCare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us.”

Read more here.

Earlier in the day, Trump took to Twitter to blame Democrats and “a few Republicans” for the collapse of the repeal-and-replace bill.

Read about that here.

 

Conservative group warns of primaries for Republicans who don’t back repeal

A top conservative group is threatening primary challenges to senators who vote against a repeal of ObamaCare after Senate Republicans failed to coalesce around a replacement plan.

Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who now serves as the president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, drew the line in the sand on Tuesday, soon after reports surfaced that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) plans to hold a repeal vote even though it’s already clear he doesn’t have the votes to pass it.

“Republicans have promised to repeal Obamacare for years and now with President Trump in the White House, there is no excuse for them to break their promise,” Cuccinelli said.

“Working with the grassroots across the country, we will seek to identify, recruit, and fund conservative challengers against Republican senators who vote against repeal.”

Read more here.

 

Dem leaders amp up calls for bipartisan ObamaCare fix

Fueled by the Senate Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Democrats are ramping up their calls for GOP leaders to reach across the aisle in search of bipartisan fixes to former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

“It’s time to move on. It’s time to start over,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday morning on the chamber floor.

“Rather than repeating the same failed partisan process yet again, Republicans should work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long term stability to the markets and improves our healthcare system.”

Sen. Tom Carper (D- Del.) said he talked to Majority Whip John Cornyn Tuesday morning about working together on a bipartisan fix to ObamaCare and will speak with other Republicans later in the day

Read more here.

 

What We’re Reading

Trump tweets about the healthcare bill a lot. He just doesn’t really make the case for it. (The Washington Post)

Insurers fear latest chaos over healthcare bill (NBC News)

How do Congress’ lawmakers get healthcare? (CNN)

 

State by State

More hospitals closing in rural America add risk for pregnant women (Reuters)

Georgia wants to tap Medicaid to double school nurses (Chattanooga Times Free Press)

Health insurance rates set to soar in Louisiana (The Advocate)