The consensus view right now is that Senate Republicans were simply too divided to keep working on health care anymore. This was confirmed on Monday by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who said that he and other senior members would tell President trump that. This would certainly further infuriate the volatile president who cares little about the legislative process and has threatened to take away subsidy payments to insurers that are under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in order to kill it anyway.
What Trump and Republicans are planning for ACA
The President made the threat via Twitter a week ago after Republicans suffered their final defeat of trying to repeal Obamacare before coming up against their August recess. On July 27, when the Senate Republicans' "skinny repeal" bill didn't pass, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded defeat, looking to move on to other legislation. The Senate was looking with some confidence to repeal the health care law before breaking for their August recess. McConnell had actually enacted an extra week of work before their recess, which the House has already taken.
Despite the humiliating failures, there are some Senators, however, who are still thinking up other ways to pass health care reform that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) determined would leave 23 million Americans uninsured. On Friday, July 28, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) met with President Trump to propose a way to deal grant money to the states as a replacement of federal subsidies. On Monday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA.) meet with Tom Price, the Secretary of Health and Human Services to discuss a similar proposal.
Battle lines drawn between insurers, Congress and Trump
Reuters reported in an article titled: "Trump aims at insurers in battle over healthcare subsidies" that 43 lawmakers in the House of Representatives from both sides want subsidies for insurers to continue.
One of the issues plaguing Obamacare is with so few insurance providers taking part in the ACA market place, it causes high premiums. Trump would like nothing more than to target those providers and send Obamacare into a death spiral. But a recent report said that there is still pending litigation with providers who are still owed money from the federal government who are or were part of the ACA.
if the courts release that money -- currently estimated to be at over $8 billion -- then it would send a signal to those providers that have been reluctant to join of another defeat to the Republican agenda, as well as a political defeat for Trump. Now the insurers appear to be getting more involved in pressuring the government to make those payments, and to further confirm that they will do so in 2018.
For Republicans who have waved the "white flag" of surrender, they've said that the priority would be to stabilize insurance providers in the market place and will reportedly start holding hearings after coming back from recess. Many Republicans are already starting to shows signs of resistance against Trump's aggressive style of legislation.