{"id":108600,"date":"2017-07-27T22:18:07","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T02:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=108600"},"modified":"2017-07-27T22:58:25","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T02:58:25","slug":"rift-between-house-senate-gop-rocks-health-care-legislation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2017\/07\/27\/rift-between-house-senate-gop-rocks-health-care-legislation\/","title":{"rendered":"Rift between House, Senate GOP rocks health care legislation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Seal<\/a>
Seal of the United States Senate (Photo By Ipankonin – Vectorized from SVG elements from, CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0)<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2013 Republicans threatening to hold up Senate health legislation because of a dispute with the House expressed dissatisfaction late Thursday with an effort by Speaker Paul Ryan to resolve the standoff. Their statements delivered a blow to GOP leaders’ hopes for pushing an initial measure through the Senate.<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was hoping to push a narrow bill through the Senate peeling back pieces of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Several GOP senators said they were willing to vote for it, but only with a promise that the House would not approve the narrow bill and send it to President Donald Trump for his signature. Instead, they are demanding House-Senate talks on a wider-ranging measure.<\/p>\n

Ryan, R-Wis., sent senators a statement saying that if \u201cmoving forward\u201d requires talks with the Senate, the House would be \u201cwilling\u201d to do so. But shortly afterward, his words received a less than enthusiastic review from the three GOP senators who’d insisted on a promise from Ryan.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot sufficient,\u201d said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who returned to the Capitol Tuesday to provide a pivotal vote that allowed the Senate to begin debating the health care bill. He’d been home in Arizona trying to decide on treatment options for brain cancer.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot yet,\u201d said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., when asked if he was ready to vote for the scaled-back Senate bill.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet’s see how everything turns out here, guys,\u201d Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told reporters.<\/p>\n

The convoluted developments played out as a divided Senate debated legislation to repeal and replace Obama’s Affordable Care Act. With Democrats unanimously opposed, the slender 52-48 GOP majority was divided among itself over what it could agree to.<\/p>\n

After a comprehensive bill failed on the Senate floor, and a straight-up repeal failed too, McConnell and his top lieutenants turned toward a lowest-common-denominator solution known as \u201cskinny repeal.\u201d It would package repeal of a few of the most unpopular pieces of the 2010 law, along with a few other measures, with the goal of getting something, anything, out of the Senate.<\/p>\n

That would be the ticket to negotiations with the House, which passed its own legislation in May.<\/p>\n

But that plan caused consternation among GOP senators after rumours began to surface that the House might just pass the \u201cskinny bill,\u201d call it a day and move on to other issues like tax reform after frittering away the first six months of Trump’s presidency on unsuccessful efforts over health care.<\/p>\n

____<\/p>\n

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Stephen Ohlemacher and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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