Mitch McConnell faced embarrassment and failure once again as two more Republicans announced their disapproval of the Affordable Health Care Act. In his two and a half years as the Senate majority leader, this Monday was perhaps the most humiliating defeat for McConnell.
The GOP healthcare bill collapses with seven years of hard work going down the drain, as the Republicans fall short of votes and lost, with only 47 of the 50 votes they needed. The effort to “repeal and immediately replace” Obamacare “will not be successful,” stated McConnell.
“In the coming days, the Senate will vote to take up the House bill with the first amendment in order being what a majority of the Senate has already supported in 2015 and that was vetoed by then-President Obama: a repeal of Obamacare with a two-year delay to provide for a stable transition period,” McConnell said.
The blame game started immediately as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) expresses how surprised he was to read in the Washington Post that McConnell was debating that “major reforms to Medicaid were so far in the distance that they would never take effect. Johnson said Monday that he’d confirmed through conversations with other senators that McConnell had made the remarks,” as noted by Politico.
“The reported comments from Leader McConnell before last Thursday about ‘don’t worry about these Medicaid changes, they won’t take effect,’ that’s troubling to me. I have talked to senators that basically confirmed that. I’ll see what Leader McConnell says tomorrow,” Johnson stated. “From my standpoint, it’s a pretty serious breach of trust, those comments. I’m just troubled by those comments,” he added.
McConnell didn’t stand back from replying and fired back that, “I prefer to speak for myself, and my view is that the Medicaid per capita cap with a responsible growth rate that is sustainable for taxpayers is the most important long-term reform in the bill. That is why it has been in each draft we have released.”
While, their “Failure to pass an Obamacare repeal could upend the entire Republican agenda. The party has spent nearly seven months on a health care overhaul, with hopes it would ease the path to tax reform. Now Trump and the GOP-led Congress are staring at an impending August recess with no major legislative achievements in hand.” noted Politico.
However, the President Trump administration doesn’t seem to be very least shook by the failure. It was noted that President Trump held a dinner with GOP senators on Monday evening where he mentioned that entire party were like “dopes” in event that they fail to pass the bill after a repeal bill was successfully passed under the Obama administration. “If the Republicans have the House, Senate and the presidency and they can’t pass this health care bill they are going to look weak,” Trump had stated. And that,“How can we not do this after promising it for years?”
However, as Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas announced that they would not be supporting the bill, the Trump administration took it as a good sign with President Trump tweeting, “Republicans should just ‘REPEAL’ failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in!”
“President Trump, intent on delivering a win no matter the terms, insists on pushing on now with flat-out Obamacare repeal, content to set the clock back to 2009 while waiting for the mythic unicorn of a workable replacement bill to arrive,” notes the NY Post, just as Gov. Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Mayor de Blasio announced that they are willing to sue the federal government if President Trump decides on signing the failed bill into a law.