When Republicans decided not to vote on their latest incarnation of an ACA repeal — the Graham-Cassidy bill — they effectively abandoned any hope of repealing the health law in 2017.
The decision not to put the bill to a vote in the Senate came a day after Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said she would join two GOP Senators in voting against the bill.
Collins decision to oppose the bill came mere minutes after the Congressional Budget Office said it would cause individuals with health insurance to be “reduced by millions.”
The bill could only afford to have two GOP senators oppose it if it was to have any chance of being passed.
To be continued …
The Graham-Cassidy bill would have killed the ACA mandates that require individuals to get health insurance or pay a penalty and the ACA’s subsidies of health insurance on the individual market. It would also have ended the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. Instead, the bill would offer block grants of federal funds to individual states, which the states could then use as they saw fit.
This defeat follows a series of ACA repeal failures in the Senate, after the House was able to narrowly pass a controversial repeal bill.
While Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the GOP’s efforts to repeal Obamacare were far from over, he did acknowledge they wouldn’t tackle the issue in the near future. Graham said, “We’re gonna come back to this after taxes,” which effectively means Republicans won’t be able to take on the healthcare issue until the start of the new year.
Graham also commented on the problem of getting Republicans to agree on an ACA repeal by stating:
“The missing agreement for us as Republicans has been we know what we don’t like. Obamacare is not working, we make that case effectively. But we’ve had a hard time articulating what we’re for until now. Now we have something to talk about that makes sense. The good news for America is Republicans are not just going to deliver on campaign promises, we’re actually going to improve health care by giving you access to people who care more about you at home than any bureaucrat could do here in Washington,”
