After seven years of emphatic campaign promises, Senate Republicans demonstrated Wednesday they don’t have the stomach to repeal „Obamacare“ when it really counts, as the Senate voted 55-45 to reject legislation undoing major portions of Barack Obama’s law without replacing it.<\/b>
\nBy ERICA WERNER and ALAN FRAM
WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 After seven years of emphatic campaign promises, Senate Republicans demonstrated Wednesday they don\u2019 t have the stomach to repeal \u201cObamacare\u201d when it really counts, as the Senate voted 55-45 to reject legislation undoing major portions of Barack Obama\u2019s law without replacing it.
Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting an amendment by Rand Paul of Kentucky that would have repealed most of former President Obama\u2019s health care law, with a two-year delay but no replacement. Congress passed nearly identical legislation in 2015 and sent it to Obama, who unsurprisingly vetoed it.
Yet this time, with a president in the White House who says he\u2019s itching to sign the bill, the measure failed on the Senate floor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that repealing \u201cObamacare\u201d without replacing it would cost more than 30 million Americans their insurance coverage, and that was a key factor in driving away a handful of Republican senators, more than Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could lose in the closely divided Senate.
The result frustrated other GOP senators, some of whom expressed disbelief that their colleagues would flip-flop on legislation they had voted for only two years ago and long promised to voters. Of the current Republican senators, only moderate Susan Collins of Maine opposed the 2015 repeal bill.
\u201cI think everybody in there, maybe except for one senator, promised their supporters, their voters that they supported repeal of Obamacare, \u201d said Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. \u201cA lot of them said \u2018root and branch.\u2019 Now, we\u2019 re so far away from that. I\u2019 d just remind my colleagues, remember what you promised your voters.\u201d
Yet the outcome was no shock in a Senate that\u2019s already shown that unity is elusive when it comes to dealing with Obamacare. The real-world implications of repeal have proven sobering to GOP senators answering to voters who\u2019 ve come to rely on expanded insurance coverage under the law.
What the party\u2019s senators will end up agreeing on instead is far from clear. Yet they plunged forward with debate toward their unknown goal, pressured by an impatient president. By week\u2019s end Republicans hope to reach agreement among themselves, and eventually with the House, on some kind of repeal and replacement the Obama law they have reviled for so long.
One possibility taking shape in talks among senators was a \u201cskinny repeal\u201d that would abolish just a few of the key elements of Obama\u2019s law including mandates that everyone purchase insurance and taxes that all GOP senators can agree to oppose.<\/p>\n

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