HEALTHCARE/OBAMACARE(ACA)/POLITICS: “Republican senators are grappling this week with how they can find consensus between their moderate and conservative factions on health care while still managing to get the 50 votes they need to gut the Affordable Care Act.
It’s tough math and although it is early in the process, so far the GOP’s health care working group — a collection of 13 GOP senators — has already encountered some of the same hurdles that hindered the House’s efforts, which struggled for weeks to collect enough votes to pass.
After last week’s negotiations, which included two official GOP health care working group meetings — one on the future of Medicaid and another on Obamacare regulations — one Republican aide familiar with the talks said point blank they were ‘much less optimistic that something will get done’ despite public statements about ‘productive meetings’ coming from GOP senators.
Early predictions (and the hope of some House moderates) had been that the Senate’s health care bill would quickly move to the left when it moved to the upper chamber, but behind the scenes, conservatives are acting as a powerful force.”
-Lauren Fox and Phil Mattingly, “GOP health care working group runs into early obstacles,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, March 15, 2017 11:43am