GOP senators oppose health care bill as written

That would suggest a breeze for Republicans' healthcare legislation to President Donald Trump's desk.

Senator Bernie Sanders agreed, telling NBC's Chuck Todd, "there's no way on God's earth that this bill should be passed this week".

"To protect the future of rural health care, we urge our elected leaders to preserve Medicaid and Medicaid expansion funding and support hospitals and caregivers in their mission to improve the health of their communities", said Dick Brown, president of the Montana Hospital Association. "And we'll see if we can take care of that". Are we going to toss them off the ship and let them drown at sea?

The doubts about the latest plan from Washington came from Republicans, Democrats and the nation's one independent governor.

Trump later criticized the House bill privately as "mean" and this week called for a health plan "with heart".

Tom Price, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services defended the Senate health care bill draft, telling CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday that "the plan in its entirety will absolutely bring premiums down". "We encourage senators to reject this harmful bill, and instead ensure Americans receive the mental health care they need to lead healthy and productive lives". Obama insisted that "small tweaks over the course of the next couple weeks, under the guise of making these bills easier to stomach, can not change the fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation". The Senate bill would put care out of reach for many of us.

"I'm announcing today that in this form I will not support it", Heller said during a press conference.

One possibility is that McConnell is anxious the provision runs afoul of the procedural rules allowing Republicans to pass the bill with a simple majority vote.

And the federal government says yeah, states, we're going to pay this much and no more.

"We also heard the House bill was never going to pass, we heard this guy could never get elected".

But other gaps will be much harder to overcome, particularly with conservatives demanding a fuller repeal of Obamacare and moderates uneasy about the phaseout of the original law's Medicaid expansion.

Others, like Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada, Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia and Rob Portman of OH, have pointed to concerns about the proposal's cuts to Medicaid. The final state budget didn't make most of the threatened cuts, but froze Medicaid reimbursement rates for nursing homes.

Absent additional legislative changes providing solutions to these problems, it's likely the Better Care Reconciliation Act will make health insurance even more expensive than it is now, throwing gasoline on the Obamacare fire and providing an escape hatch to Democrats eager to flee Obamacare's enormous shadow.

She was retweeting a column written for the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group and Harvard researchers that have claimed that anywhere from 18,000 to 28,000 people could very well die in 2026 if they were to lose their coverage due to the new healthcare policy.

Or, as former President Barack Obama said Thursday in an emotional appeal on Facebook, "The Senate bill, unveiled today, is not a health care bill".

All together, it shows how long-term conservative goals of cutting taxes and entitlement spending have overtaken Trump's agenda, as the bill faces critical votes in the Senate as soon as next week that could take it to the precipice of becoming law. He said insurance companies are "flocking and leaving" the markets it set up. If the federal government caps its Medicaid contributions, medical care for more than 1 million children on Medicaid in Pennsylvania will suffer, because their needs will be forced to compete with the needs of the disabled, elderly and parents, children's groups said. So it would basically erode the ability of states to pay for their Medicaid programs.