McConnell to bring up vote on Obamacare repeal next week
Next week, Senate Republicans will make one more attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with just 51 votes.
"It is the Leader's intention to consider Graham-Cassidy on the floor next week," McConnell Spokesman David Popp told CBS News' John Nolen Wednesday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, has until Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, to hold a vote that would enable Republicans to use a simple majority to pass the measure using a budgetary tool known as reconciliation. To revisit the bill after Sept. 30 with the smaller number of votes, Congress would have to pass another budget resolution.
The measure, proposed by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina and Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, would take all of the estimated $110 billion federal dollars currently spent on Obamacare and convert that funding into block grants to the states. Each state would get a lump sum of federal money to spend as it sees fit.
As Republicans make their last-ditch effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, former president Obama said he recognizes the ACA as passed "was full of things that still need to be fixed." But when he sees attempts to undo that legislation "without any demonstrable economic or actuarial or plain, common-sense rationale, it frustrates," Obama said. The ACA passed during his administration in 2010 and is considered to be his signature legislative achievement.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is expected to release a preliminary analysis of the bill next week.