Senate leaders await analysis of GOP health bill

The agency has already issued two reports on earlier versions of the GOP health care bill, but lawmakers continued to make changes up until the last minute to secure enough votes for passage.

He added, “Whatever CBO says about the House bill today, this much is absolutely clear: the status quo under Obamacare is completely unacceptable and totally unsustainable”.

“The Texas legislature is cynically advancing an aggressive agenda of discriminatory legislation for political gain”, said Rebecca L. Robertson, legal and policy director for the ACLU of Texas.

They watched as Republican Pat McCrory, who signed and defended the North Carolina bill as governor, became the only incumbent governor in the U.S.to lose in the general election previous year. To avoid a filibuster, Senate Republicans plan to take the bill up under budget reconciliation rules, which only require a majority vote, but it means the legislation can not increase the federal deficit within a 10-year window.

The funding proposal sought to provide a roadmap to fixing school finance, an issue that the House has tried to address for years.

The health care bill Republicans recently pushed through the House would leave 23 million more Americans without insurance and confront others who have costly medical conditions with coverage that could prove unaffordable, Congress’ official budget analysts said Wednesday.

Also Wednesday the Senate Select Committee on school funding passed out its school finance plan.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration released a report that found a doubling of average premiums for individually purchased coverage from 2013, just before Obama’s statute took effect, to this year.

“I don’t know how we get to 50 [votes] at the moment”, McConnell told Reuters in an exclusive interview Wednesday.

Republicans face a tricky balancing act. The CBO score raises the stakes for Republican senators now working on their own version of the legislation.

Conservatives argue that scaling back these requirements will allow insurers to offer a wider variety of policies and will lower rates, enticing more people to sign up for coverage.

Rep. Melissa Rooker, a moderate Fairway Republican, said she would like the bill to boost education funding more than it does, but she and other lawmakers who feel the same way are stymied by lawmakers’ inability to agree on increasing taxes to pay for it while also closing projected budget shortfalls totaling $887 million through June 2019. Governors in Arkansas and Kentucky have rebuffed the efforts as unnecessary, and South Dakota’s Republican governor vetoed a proposal in March.

A Senate provision that could eliminate food stamps to more than 100,000 people also is absent.

Wednesday’s projections will serve as starting points for Senate Republicans writing their own health care bill.

In taking a Republican-only approach to healthcare and taxes, McConnell said of Democrats, “They’re not interested in doing what we’re interested in doing”.

Unger, who voted against the Senate’s changes to the tax bill, questioned the fiscal soundness of the proposed income-tax reductions during Senate floor debate, and urged fellow senators to fix the budget and take up comprehensive tax reform in a special session later this year.