Senate Republicans emerged from a closed-door meeting Tuesday pledging they will make another attempt at partially repealing and replacing Obamacare before a Sept. 30 deadline ends any chance of fulfilling a longstanding Republican campaign promise.
“There is a lot of interest in the bill Senator Graham and Senator Cassidy have been working on,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said after the meeting.
Vice President Mike Pence joined rank-and-file Republicans at their weekly lunch meeting to help build support for the plan authored by Sens. Graham of South Carolina and Cassidy of Louisiana, which would convert Obamacare funding into block grants for states to use at their discretion.
“I’ve never felt better about where we are at,” Graham said after the meeting. “At the end of the day, I really believe we are going to get 50 Republican votes, and I make a prediction. There are going to be a lot of Democrats struggling with a no vote.”
Graham targeted eight Democrats, including politically vulnerable Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mich, whose states did not agree to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. Those states would be eligible for more money for health care under Graham-Cassidy.
“Their states do far better than Obamacare in terms of the money and their states have more control of the money,” Graham said. “That is going to be a hard no.”
But no Democrats are expected to back the bill and McConnell stopped short of announcing a floor vote next week.
While the measure has developed sudden momentum, it has yet to earn the backing of the minimum 50 GOP votes that would be needed to pass it with Pence serving as the tiebreaker.
Republicans are very close to running out of time. In order to utilize a legislative tool that would prevent Democrats from filibustering, they would have to take up the bill before Sept. 30, which is the end of the fiscal year.
“We are in the process of discussing all of this,” McConnell said when asked by a reporter why he has not scheduled a vote. “Everybody knows the opportunity expires at the end of the month.”
Key holdouts include Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Ala., whose governor came out against the Graham-Cassidy bill Tuesday afternoon, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who told reporters Tuesday she is waiting to see a Congressional Budget Office analysis.
“It seems to have many of the same flaws of the bill that we rejected previously,” Collins said. “In fact it has some additional flaws because it has some language that leads me to believe people with pre-existing conditions might not be protected in some states.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he opposes the bill because it does not fully repeal Obamacare.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who voted against the last attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare, is undecided. He has complained the measure was not churned through the full deliberative process in the Senate and that it would lack a full CBO analysis. The CBO plans on releasing a preliminary score by next week but not a detailed analysis of the impact of the bill.
“It’s an important issue to me,” McCain said Tuesday.
But McCain may be more likely to back the bill because it has earned the support of Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and is sponsored by Graham, who is perhaps his closest friend in the Senate.
The Graham-Cassidy proposal will be discussed at a Senate Finance Committee hearing next week.
