They dont have the votes.
They don't have the votes. BigFishDesign / Getty

The vote on the Senate Trumpcare bill no one wants has been delayed through the July 4 recess due to a lack of consensus among members of the GOP. It's a little what you'd expect. I suspected that we'd see opposition from senators from states with Republican governors that took part in Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, and that's part of it—Ohio Governor John Kasich, for example, has been vocal in his opposition to the bill. Other detractors think the bill doesn't go far enough to dismantle our health care system, which I guess is what happens when vindictive self-sabotage turns into a policy goal.

Anyway, here's the NY Times:

Senators from states that expanded the Medicaid program — and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine — would not brook many of those changes, especially the measure to severely undermine protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions. They wanted more money for mental health benefits for people addicted to opioids and money for states to cover people left behind by the rollback of the Medicaid program in both the House and Senate versions.

Three Republican senators — Ms. Collins, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — had announced they would vote against the motion to begin debate that had been scheduled to hit the Senate floor on Wednesday, joining Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, who made the same pledge on Friday.

A bevy of other senators from both flanks of the party seemed headed in the same direction if they did not see changes made to the Senate health care bill, leaving the measure in deep peril, since Republicans can only lose two votes from their own party.

And it's not just Senate Republicans who are struggling:

Even the Trump administration is divided over what comes next, especially on the payment of subsidies to health insurance companies to compensate for reducing out-of-pocket costs for low-income people.

Mr. Trump has threatened to withhold the monthly payments as a way to induce Democrats to bargain with him over the future of the Affordable Care Act. Administration officials said Mr. Trump did not want to make the payments if the Senate did not pass a health care bill this week. But they said Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, had urged the White House not to cut off the payments abruptly.

A federal judge has ruled that the payments are illegal because Congress never appropriated money for them, but that ruling is being appealed. Any interruption of the payments could have a dire destabilizing effect on markets, insurers say. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina recently blamed the Trump administration’s mixed signals on the subsidy for most of its proposed 23 percent spike in premiums next year.

Turns out health care is complicated. Who knew?