After the Congressional Budget Office released a score for the American Health Care Act predicting 22 million would lose coverage in the next decade, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was forced to abandon his hopes of a Republican win to celebrate during the Fourth of July congressional recess.
McConnell announced that a vote for the AHCA would be delayed until after recess, despite multiple earlier reports and declarations that he would try to pass the bill before senators left for the holiday. This is good news and bad news, but mostly a cause for suspense.
The reason McConnell had to delay the vote is because right now, Republicans simply don’t have enough support in the Senate to pass the bill alone. No Democrats or Independents are voting for it, and right now a handful of Republican senators have announced they weren’t comfortable with it either.
For the Republican holdouts, the reasons center either around the Medicaid cuts or cuts to Planned Parenthood that would limit low-income womens’ access to abortion. Only two Republican women are tackling the Planned Parenthood cut - exactly the amount Republicans can afford to lose - which means the more likely issue for Republicans to negotiate on is the Medicaid cuts and online logo design.
But on the other hand, there isn’t any obvious place for Republicans to go. The Medicaid expansion implemented by Obamacare has single handedly been one of the most significant causes of the increase in coverage, and many Republicans in expansion-heavy states simply don’t feel that they can sacrifice those necessary expansions in coverage.
On the other hand, the bill was negotiated to be more favorable for far right Republicans, who may abandon support for the bill if it allows too many subsidies or doesn’t cut the Medicaid expansion.
The problem with the bill is it’s attempting to meet multiple, explicitly conflicting demands. They’re attempting to repeal a relatively effective health care plan with a similar version of the plan, modified to have none of the support and less protections for the poor and elderly. But rather than admit this and create a real plan that helps Americans, they’re almost certainly going to make some minor or inefficient modifications to the plan and call it a day.
It’s entirely possible that with a few amendments, they can get the necessary votes to pass what is, overall, a terrible pill. It’s also entirely possible that this disaster of a bill will fail in the Senate, but that can only happen if enough Republicans develop enough of a spine to stand up to the GOP. It’s hard to predict which outcome is more likely, and worried Americans need to consider both a possibility.
The fact that Americans generally hate the AHCA en masse is of no consequence to Republicans, so don’t expect them to make any changes based on what the public wants - all negotiation will be taking place between politicians and businessmen. But don’t be surprised if it goes nowhere at all.