Senate Plans to Vote on Latest Obamacare Repeal Bill Next Week
Will the Graham-Cassidy bill survive?
Republicans still can’t get their act together on Obamacare repeal, but, they’re moving forward nonetheless.
Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader McConnell announced plans to move the Graham-Cassidy bill to the floor for debate next week.
Do they have the votes to open up debate on this bill? Your guess is as good as ours. Unlike previous last minute clusters, McConnell said they’ll only bring the bill to the floor if he knows he has the votes to proceed.
From Politico:
The Senate will vote next week on the latest bill to repeal Obamacare — but the outcome is anything but certain.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) plans to put a bill written by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to a vote, hoping that a looming Sept. 30 deadline to pass the bill with just 50 votes will create enough pressure to finally pass a repeal of the health care law, his office said.
“It is the leader’s intention to consider Graham/Cassidy on the floor next week,” a spokeswoman said.
McConnell has told colleagues he will only bring up the bill if it will succeed. The statement does leave some wiggle room to not proceed with a vote.
It’s still anyone’s guess whether the bill’s backers can get to 50 votes. One Republican senator suggested that McConnell may ultimately decide to bring the bill up for another failed vote, in part to show GOP donors and President Donald Trump that the Senate GOP tried again.
Trump himself joined the ongoing debate Wednesday night, tweeting that Graham-Cassidy was a “great Bill.”
“I would not sign Graham-Cassidy if it did not include coverage of pre-existing conditions. It does!” Trump tweeted, alluding to recent attacks on the bill that it won’t protect patients with congenital or pre-existing illnesses.
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Comments
I don’t trust Lindsey Graham and would like to find out what’s actually in this bill. Putting “pre-existing” (high risk, actually) patients back on the States like it was before might be a good thing (for the insurance companies), but what else is in this bill? As usual, they’ll probably have to pass it to find out what’s in it.
Sounds like another boon doogle. We’ve been duped two previous times this year on this already. At this point, full repeal is not going to ever happen. I guess I’d settle for Obamacare lite. Anything that removes the individual mandate at least.
Asking for a state-by-state chaos — in the short term and the long term — and state-by-state corruption.
Better than nationally orchestrated chaos, and centralized, nationwide corruption. Anything that can remove power, or money from Washington is an improvement (though here a rather small one).
The states couldn’t possibly do any worse than the feds, and they don’t have the power to force their screw-ups on the whole country — most will do better than Washington could because the state legislatures are less owned by the party establishments and their contributors than Congress.
Is this a clean and full repeal (and replace). Sadly no. There are still too many swamp creatures in the DC swamp and sadly those are elected Senators. We’ll need to get those removed before anything better could pass. Problem is we can’t wait. We need something now to halt the Obamacare slide into single payer. This bill will do that. Each state can figure out what works for them and when CA, and IL and the like all self implode with a single payer systems, the contrasts will start illuminating people to the freeer market systems that are actually working.