WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans narrowly agreed on Tuesday to open debate
on a bill to end Obamacare, but the party's seven-year effort to roll back
Democratic President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law still faces
significant hurdles.
The Senate
deadlocked 50-50 on moving forward with the healthcare debate, forcing Vice
President Mike Pence to cast the tie-breaking vote.
Senator John
McCain, who was diagnosed this month with brain cancer and has been recovering
from surgery at home in Arizona, made a dramatic return to the U.S. Capitol to
cast a crucial vote in favor of proceeding.
The outcome
was a huge relief for President Donald Trump, who had pushed his fellow
Republicans hard in recent days to live up to the party's campaign promises to
repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Minutes after
the vote, Trump called it "a big step."
But the
narrow victory on a simple procedural matter raised questions about whether
Republicans can muster the votes necessary to pass any of the various
approaches to repeal.
Moderates
are worried repeal will cost millions of low-income Americans their insurance
and conservatives are angry the proposed bills do not go far enough to gut
Obamacare, which they consider government overreach.
In a first
vote of the many likely to come this week, the plan to repeal and replace
Obamacare that Senate Republicans have been working on for months failed to get
the 60 votes needed for approval on Tuesday night. The vote was 43 in favor and
57 against.
Nine
Republicans, ranging from moderates such as Susan Collins of Maine to
conservatives such as Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted against the bill, which
would have made deep cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program for the
poor, and reduced Obamacare subsidies to lower-income people to help them
defray the cost of health insurance.
Earlier
McCain, 80, received an ovation from his fellow senators when he entered the
chamber to cast a vote to open debate. After that vote, he decried growing
partisanship in the Senate and urged members to learn how "to trust each
other again."
Collins and
Senator Lisa Murkowski were the only Republicans to oppose the measure to open
debate, and with Republicans controlling the Senate by a 52-48 majority, those
were the only votes the party leadership could afford to lose. Democrats were
united in opposition to the motion to proceed.
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