Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
First Glimmer Of Bipartisanship Seen On Hill As McConnell Admits GOP Can't Fix Health Care Themselves
Senate Democrats are still hanging tight on the same message as the GOP鈥檚 seven-year push to repeal Obamacare careens off course: Drop the one-party approach and work with us to fix the health care law. Even the five Democratic senators facing re-election battles next year in states President Donald Trump turned bright red are showing no interest in making deals before Republicans abandon their attempt to push through repeal with a bare majority. (Schor and Kim, 7/18)
Fueled by the Senate Republicans鈥 failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Democrats are ramping up their calls for GOP leaders to reach across the aisle in search of bipartisan fixes to former President Barack Obama鈥檚 signature domestic achievement. 鈥淚t's time to move on. It鈥檚 time to start over,鈥 Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday morning on the chamber floor. (Lillis, 7/18)
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat and chief architect of the Affordable Care Act, offered Democratic help. Acknowledging that the law, commonly referred to as Obamacare, needs to be 鈥渦pdated,鈥 she urged the Trump administration and the GOP Congress to stop threatening to withhold vital payments to insurers to cover high-cost patients and other actions that have destabilized some insurance markets. 鈥淲e would have been working with them from day one,鈥 Pelosi said in an interview Tuesday. 鈥淐all it something else, name the provision something else, save face, get yourself a victory, but protect the American people.鈥 (Lochhead, 7/18)
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Tuesday聽she isn't declaring victory over the collapse of the Senate Republican healthcare bill, pointing to the GOP's long history of working to repeal key provisions of ObamaCare. "I鈥檓 not doing a touchdown dance over health care today. This zombie bill has come back from the dead over [and] over again,"聽Warren wrote on Twitter. (Beavers, 7/18)
Centrist House Republicans and Democrats huddled on Tuesday and discussed healthcare in the wake of the collapse of Senate GOP efforts to repeal ObamaCare, multiple sources told The Hill. Members of the GOP鈥檚 Tuesday Group and the New Democrat Coalition met in the Capitol, part of a periodic gathering of the two moderate groups. But healthcare dominated the meeting, participants said. (Wong and Lillis, 7/18)
鈥淲e will have demonstrated that Republicans by themselves are not prepared at this particular point to do a replacement and that doesn鈥檛 mean the problems all go away," McConnell said. "You鈥檒l have to look at our committee chairmen and their ranking members." (McIntire, 7/18)
Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is organizing a bipartisan group of senators who are former governors to discuss possible bipartisan action on healthcare, with a meeting planned for Tuesday night. The meeting comes as talk of bipartisan action to stabilize ObamaCare markets is picking up in the wake of the collapse of the Republican healthcare bill. (Sullivan, 7/18)
Tuesday afternoon, Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) indicated he would convene hearings soon to explore ways to develop more-limited healthcare legislation. (Levey and Mascaro, 7/18)
With the GOP鈥檚 plan to repeal Obamacare near collapse, the Republican chairman of the Senate health committee announced Tuesday he will convene hearings to look for ways to stabilize the individual insurance market. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said the hearings are needed to help millions of Americans who will be unable to buy insurance unless Congress acts. (Collins, 7/18)