Her counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of NY, said after the votes that Democrats who resisted the GOP legislation “are not celebrating”.
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What is the “skinny repeal?”.
But Capito smartly voted opposite those two senators – Susan Collins of ME and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – this week in order to allow the debate to continue, instead of shelving the entire repeal and replacement discussion.
“This is a disappointment, a disappointment indeed”, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the bill failed.
Democrats, meanwhile, are celebrating the bill’s failure.
Later Wednesday, the Senate voted down two more proposals related to health care.
Anthem Inc, a health insurer with more than one million customers in Obamacare individual insurance plans, threatened to further shrink its 2018 market participation because of uncertainty about the government paying for the subsidies that make the plans affordable for millions of Americans. But just repealing the requirement would lead to a spike in premiums. “If moving forward requires a conference committee, that is something the House is willing to do”.
Three Republican senators say they will not vote for a new health care plan being crafted by GOP leaders – unless they get a guarantee from Speaker Paul Ryan that it will not pass the House as-is. But since all it does is remove the most hated elements of Obamacare, skinny repeal does have the best chance of all the proposed bills of being voted in by the Senate.
The bill was defeated 43 to 57, with nine Republicans opposing the plan. Graham said that the “skinny bill” as-is was a “fraud”, “disaster”, “pig in a poke” and also “half-assed”, and that passing it would be “the dumbest thing in history”. “The skinny bill as policy is a disaster”, he said.
The vote comes after months of pressure from the White House for Congress to move ahead with a promise to repeal the ACA, also known as “Obamacare”, and replace it with something else.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 32 million fewer people would hold insurance by 2026, if Congress failed to come up with a suitable replacement.
The first amendment vote scheduled is for shortly after 2 p.m. ET – a “Medicare for All” bill.
He said the Republican Party has solutions to some of Obamacare’s problems, but they need to be discussed and debated.
The Senate is expected to finish the legislation by Friday.
Republicans have faced an internal rift over how to replace Obamacare, with hard-line conservatives seeking a bill that thoroughly scraps it and moderates unwilling to support measures that could strip tens of millions of people of their health insurance.
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If the Senate manages to pass any of these bills, the bill would then go to conference with the House of Representatives, where the final version of the bill would be drafted, after which both chambers would have to vote on it. And it’s not even clear if that will pass.
