It's safe to assume that the negotiations for the Senate's overhaul of the health care system are delicate as they take place behind closed doors. The controversial move means to take health care away from millions of people as it was determined by the conservative-run Congressional Budget Office (CBO) department which scored the bill. Despite this, Republicans have continued to "spin" their bill when they've talked about it as moving in the right direction.
Bill passage gets complicated
Blasting News, however, referred to reports that the Senate Parliamentarian had flagged language on the bill that would violate the Byrd Rule to say nothing of the related response to the language that will cause anti-abortion senators to reject the bill outright.
There are also more reports of a revolt taking place among conservative senators as the bill appears to tilt more towards the moderates. While the political world was focused on the Comey hearing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell apparently fast-tracked the process to get a vote on the bill as soon as possible but the revolt could prove costly.
It is said that the Senate might lose the votes of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) who are critical to passing the bill before the end of the month. Sen. Paul has been "on a warpath" during the GOP Conference lunches over the past week and is of the view that the House bill is simply not good enough because it still kept 90 percent of Obamacare.
He's apparently against the high-risk pools -- which Republicans apparently favor -- and overall doesn't want the marketplace to be saved by cash infusions.
Conservatives revolt over bill
A Republican senator who wished to remain anonymous told Politico in an article titled: "Conservatives near revolt on Senate health care negotiations" that they believed the vote from both mentioned senators would be a "no." If this is correct, then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have to rely on swing votes from Sens.
Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska from his 52-senator majority. As the Blasting News article referred to above, the votes are already adjusted to pass by a simple majority, but again, that's unless the Parliamentarian is overruled by the Presiding Officer for flagging the bill to have violated the Byrd Rule.
Now the new issue appears to be with the bill tilting towards the moderates where it intends to keep the infrastructure of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare, with there being a more "generous wind-down of the law's Medicaid expansion." They point to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) who said that the passion was going up with more extreme conservatives and among the moderates. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) have both also said that they're weary of the party's direction in regard to the bill, with Cruz saying that they still had a long way to go with repealing the ACA. But Senator Lindsey Graham seems to have driven the final nail in the coffin, saying that the bill will definitely not pass through the Senate, and blaming the House Republicans starting at 6:20 in the following clip from "Face The Nation."
