Senate health-care bill faces serious resistance from GOP moderates

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/senate-health-care-bill-faces-serious-resistance-from-gop-moderates/2017/06/24/d6d8cf2e-584d-11e7-ba90-f5875b7d1876_story.html?utm_term=.93a0f38b4f4d


A small group of moderate Republican senators, worried that their leaders’ health-care bill could damage the nation’s social safety net, may pose at least as significant an obstacle to the measure’s passage as their colleagues on the right.

The vast changes the legislation would make to Medicaid, the country’s broadest source of public health insurance, would represent the largest single step the government has ever taken toward conservatives’ long-held goal of reining in federal spending on health-care entitlement programs in favor of a free-market system.

That dramatic shift and the bill’s bold redistribution of wealth — the billions of dollars taken from coverage for the poor would help fund tax cuts for the wealthy — is creating substantial anxiety for several Republican moderates whose states have especially benefited from the expansion of Medicaid that the Affordable Care Act has allowed since 2014.

Their concerns that the legislation would harm the nation’s most vulnerable and cause many Americans to become uninsured have thrust into stark relief the ideological fault lines within the GOP. Though Senate conservatives were the first to threaten to torpedo the bill, contending that it is too generous, the potential loss of nearly half a dozen moderate lawmakers’ votes may be the main hurdle. Since the bill will get no support from Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can afford defections from no more than two Republicans as he tries to bring it to a vote this week.

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