Murphy, Blumenthal: Critical Week Ahead For Republican Health Care Bill

July 10--A critical week lies ahead for the Republican effort in the Senate to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal told reporters before returning to Washington Monday.

"This is a decision week for the health care bill, I think by the end of the week we will know whether Republicans have the votes, or whether they are going to need to abandon this effort," Murphy said.

For Connecticut, Murphy said, the stakes are high. Cuts to Medicaid contained within the bill would blow a nearly $3 billion hole in the state budget in 10 years and lead to more than 200,000 additional uninsured state residents, he said.

It's been a turbulent few weeks since Senate Republicans released legislation to dismantle Obamacare. Democrats uniformly opposed the bill and have been working furiously to drum up public opposition to it. A planned vote before the July 4 recess was postponed.

"Republicans from Maine to Kansas, from North Dakota to Arizona, came home to a furor from their constituents over the damage that would be done to them by this bill," Murphy said. "If the Republicans had trouble before the July 4th recess, they have a whole mess more trouble on their hands now that their members have been back home for a week."

Blumenthal said various amendments and provisions that have been proposed while Congress was away have done nothing to change the core focus of the legislation: hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, largely rolling back the Medicaid expansion that occurred after the Affordable Care Act was passed.

"The slashing approach taken by the Republicans ... remains the prime failing of this new draft," Blumenthal said.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said if Republicans can't agree on a path forward on health care they may have to take bipartisan action to shore up insurance markets.

Blumenthal said the admission that Republicans may work with Democrats on health care legislation was "encouraging," but also may have been a ploy by McConnell to get wary Republicans to support his bill. Still, both he and Murphy said they are ready and willing to work with the GOP.

"I've talked to many Republicans, quietly, who deeply desire a bipartisan process on heath care reform," Murphy said. "Mitch McConnell hinted at it this last week, he's got a lot of members of his caucus that want that bipartisan process to happen, and maybe by the end of this week we can start to see a path to Republicans and Democrats sitting down to fix what it still wrong with our health care system."

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