WASHINGTON (AP) – Provisions shoehorned into the Republican health care bill dangle extra money for Alaska and Wisconsin, home states of one GOP senator whose vote party leaders desperately need and another who co-sponsored the legislation, according to analysts who’ve studied the legislation.
The 140-page measure, which top Republicans hope to push through the Senate next week, is stuffed with language making some states winners and others losers. Aides say the legislation is still changing as leaders hunt the 50 GOP “yes” votes they’ll need to turn this summer’s jarring Senate rejection of the party’s crusade to erase President Barack Obama’s law into an eleventh-hour triumph.
Alaska is home to GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who’s among a handful of Republicans who’ve not said how they’ll vote. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is one of the bill’s co-sponsors and his support is not in question, but the episode suggests the value of helping craft of legislation.
The bill was chiefly written by GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. It would end Obama’s Medicaid expansion and subsidies for people buying private insurance and combine the money into new block grants for states.
With all Democrats opposed, Republicans controlling the Senate 52-48 can lose only two votes if they are to succeed, leaving the bill’s fate uncertain. Generally, it would shift money from states that expanded their Medicaid programs for the poor under Obama’s statute, which tend to be run by Democrats, to the largely Republican-run states that shunned that expansion.