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Health Care Bill Teeters, GOP Adds Money to Woo Dissidents Associated Press by Alan Fram — Top Republicans are adding money to their staggering effort to repeal the Obama health care law and say they’re pushing toward a climactic Senate face-off this week. Yet their path to succeeding in their last-gasp effort has grown narrower, perhaps impossible. GOP senator's’ opposition to their party’s drive to scrap President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act swelled to lethal numbers Sunday. Moderate Sen. Susan Collins all but closed the door on supporting the teetering bill and conservative Sen. Ted Cruz said that “right now” he doesn’t back it.…But the Congressional Budget Office, which is lawmakers’ nonpartisan fiscal analyst, has said that it doesn’t have time to determine the bill’s impact on coverage and premiums, major factors for some lawmakers deciding their votes. Instead, the office is expected to only detail its estimates of the measure’s effect on federal deficits. A vote must occur this week for Republicans to have any chance of prevailing with their narrow Senate majority. Next Sunday, protections expire against a Democratic filibuster, bill-killing delays that Republicans lack the votes to overcome.
- GOP Health Bill All but Dead; McCain Again Deals the Blow Associated Press by Erica Werner and Alan Fram — Sen. John McCain declared his opposition Friday to the GOP's last-ditch effort to repeal and replace "Obamacare," dealing a likely death blow to the legislation and, perhaps, to the Republican Party's years of vows to kill the program. "I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal," McCain said in a statement, referring to the bill by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. His opposition likely leaves the bill at least one vote short of the support needed for passage. "I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried," McCain said. "Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it."
- Latest Obamacare Repeal Effort is Most Far-Reaching The New York Times by Kate Zernike, Reed Abelson and Abby Goodnough — For decades, Republicans have dreamed of taking some of the vast sums the federal government spends on health care entitlements and handing the money over to states to use as they saw best. Now, in an 11th-hour effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the party has come up with a way to repackage the funding for the law it loathes into a trillion-dollar pot of state grants. The plan is at the core of the bill that Senate Republican leaders have vowed to bring to a vote next week. It was initially seen as a long-shot effort by Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy. But for all its ad hoc, last-minute feel, it has evolved into the most far-reaching repeal proposal of all. It dismantles the Medicaid expansion and the system of subsidies to help people afford insurance. It gives the states the right to waive many of the consumer protections under President Obama's landmark health law. And it removes the guaranteed safety net that has insured the country's poorest citizens for more than half a century.
- Obamacare States May Lose $180 Billion Under Senate Bill Bloomberg by Anna Edney — States that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare would be hard-hit by spending cuts called for in Republican senators' latest bill to repeal and replace the health law, while states that didn't expand the program stand to benefit. The 32 states that increased their Medicaid coverage for low-income people would lose $180 billion in federal funding, but states that didn't would gain $73 billion from 2020 to 2026, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The state-by-state breakdown covers a wide range, with New York at one extreme seeing a cut of 35 percent and Mississippi at the other with a 148 percent boost.
- Did Democrats Jump the Gun with Single-Payer Splash? Politico by Elana Schor — There's second-guessing inside the party about Bernie Sanders' timing as Republicans take aim again at Obamacare. Last week, a group of Senate Democrats rallied behind single-payer health care at a splashy news conference. This week, the same group is scrambling to beat back the GOP's latest Obamacare repeal blitz. The contrast shows the chasm between the two parties' approach to health care: Republicans claim that Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All" pitch fueled their revived repeal effort, an argument that even Democratic single-payer foes dismiss as untrue. Yet some Democrats wish more attention had been paid to protecting the Affordable Care Act before some of the party's biggest names turned to single payer.