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McConnell
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is rejecting President Trump's
suggestion on how the Senate could promptly pass its ObamaCare overhaul
measure -- by immediately repealing the 2010 heath care law and
replacing it later.
The Kentucky Republican said Friday night that the
bill, which includes significant and complex changes to ObamaCare,
remains challenging but "we are going to stick with that path."
He also riffed on Trump’s winning campaign slogan, saying, "It's not easy making America great again, is it?"
McConnell, the leader of GOP-controlled Senate,
responded to Trump tweeting earlier in the day: “If Republican Senators
are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately
REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!”
Trump is trying to revive an approach that GOP
leaders and the president himself considered but dismissed months ago as
impractical and politically unwise.
The Senate introduced its bill about two weeks ago
but left Washington for July 4 recess without enough support from the
chamber’s 52 GOP senators to pass the measure. McConnell will need
support from at least 50 of them because the bill has no support among
Senate Democrats.
The GOP-controlled House passed its ObamaCare overhaul bill earlier this month.
McConnell's is struggling to bridge the divide between moderates and conservatives.
The president also tweeted his message shortly after
Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse appeared on Fox News Channel's "Fox
& Friends" to talk about a letter he had sent to Trump making that
exact suggestion: a vote on repealing former President Barack Obama's
health law followed by a new effort at a working out a replacement.
Trump is a known "Fox & Friends" viewer, but Sen.
Rand Paul, R-Ky., also claimed credit for recommending the tactic to
the president in a conversation earlier in the week.
"Sen. Rand Paul suggested this very idea to the
president," said Paul spokesman Sergio Gor. "The senator fully agrees
that we must immediately repeal Obamacare and then work on replacing it
right away."
Either way, Trump's suggestion has the potential to
harden divisions within the GOP as conservatives like Paul and Sasse
complain that McConnell's bill does not go far enough in repealing
former President Barack Obama's health care law while moderates
criticize it as overly harsh in kicking people off insurance rolls,
shrinking the Medicaid safety net and increasing premiums for older
Americans.
McConnell has been trying to strike deals with
members of both factions in order to finalize a rewritten bill lawmakers
can vote on when they return to the Capitol the second week of July.
Even before Trump was inaugurated in January,
Republicans had debated and ultimately discarded the idea of repealing
the overhaul before replacing it, concluding that both must happen
simultaneously. Doing otherwise would invite accusations that
Republicans were simply tossing people off coverage and would roil
insurance markets by raising the question of whether, when and how
Congress might replace Obama's law once it was gone.
The idea also would leave unresolved the quandary
lawmakers are struggling with now, about how to replace Obama's system
of online insurance markets, tax subsidies and an expanded Medicaid with
something that could get enough Republican votes to pass Congress.
House Republicans barely passed their version of a replacement bill in
May, and the task is proving even tougher in the Senate, where McConnell
has almost no margin for error.
Moderates were spooked as the week began with a
Congressional Budget Office finding that McConnell's draft bill would
result in 22 million people losing insurance over the next decade, only 1
million fewer than under the House-passed legislation which Trump
privately told senators was "mean." But conservatives continue to insist
that the bill must go further than just repealing some of the mandates
and taxes in Obama's law.
Underscoring the fissures within the GOP,
conservative group leaders on that call welcomed Trump's suggestion but
said it didn't go far enough because it could open the door to a
subsequent bipartisan compromise to replace Obama's law. At the same
time, a key House Republican, Rep. Kevin Brady, chairman of the House
Ways and Means Committee, rejected Trump's suggestion, contending that
it "doesn't achieve what President Trump set out to do."