Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) dealt her party another punishing blow to its\u00a0already maligned and delayed health care bill.<\/p>\n
After the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its estimate\u00a0on Monday that 22 million Americans would lose access to health care coverage\u00a0under the Senate Republican bill, Collins published a series of tweets explaining why she will vote against moving forward on the bill:<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to work w\/ my GOP & Dem colleagues to fix the flaws in ACA. CBO analysis shows Senate bill won’t do it. I will vote no on mtp 1\/3\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCBO says 22 million people lose insurance; Medicaid cuts hurt most vulnerable Americans; access to healthcare in rural areas threatened. 2\/3\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSenate bill doesn’t fix ACA problems for rural Maine. Our hospitals are already struggling. 1 in 5 Mainers are on Medicaid. 3\/3\u201d<\/p>\n
Collins, one of the few true moderates left in the Senate, has been on the fence about the Republican bill from the beginning. But losing her support for the bill\u2019s current makeup makes it easier for other Republicans to walk away from a bill that\u2019s reportedly supported by just 17% of Americans.<\/p>\n
The CBO report wasn\u2019t all terrible for Republicans, but it carried very few positive notes. The report says the bill would cut costs more than the House Republican bill while also taking away insurance for slightly fewer people. However, that 22 million number is impossible to ignore. And it has Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell frantically telling his fellow Republicans, including President Trump, that if the bill fails to pass the Senate, he and his colleagues will be forced to negotiate with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York).<\/p>\n
Trump has said he\u2019s comfortable letting the Obamacare state exchanges \u201cfail\u201d if Republicans fail to pass a repeal of the health care law.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be great if we get it done, and if we don’t get it done it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like, and that’s OK, and I understand that very well,\u201d Trump told a group of Republican senators visiting the White House on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Whether it\u2019s intentional or not, that might actually be the smartest move politically, at least for Trump. It lets him say he did everything he could to pass the repeal that his Republican base wants. And if Obamacare doesn\u2019t\u00a0fail \u2014\u00a0and most experts think it will continue to be at least moderately successful in the coming years \u2014\u00a0he can take retroactive credit for not dealing Americans a crippling blow to their surprisingly resilient health care law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) dealt her party another punishing blow to its\u00a0already maligned and delayed health care bill. After the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its estimate\u00a0on Monday that 22 million Americans would lose access to health care coverage\u00a0under the Senate Republican bill, Collins published a series of tweets explaining why she will vote against…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}