Despite using the reconciliation process, which allows them to pass a budget-related bill with just a simple majority, an impasse remains in key areas. Nonetheless, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky.) has been privately warning his colleagues and donors that the GOP's 52-48 majority should not be taken for granted, according to CNN.
First, the House of Representatives had fits trying to get a health care bill passed by the Republicans.
"The question for every senator, Democrat or Republican, is whether they will side with Obamacare's architects, which have been so destructive to our country, or with its forgotten victims", Trump said on July 24, adding that any senator who failed to vote against it "is telling America that you are fine with the Obamacare nightmare". "As far as I'm concerned, they shot their wad on health care and that's the way it is", Utah Senator Orrin Hatch-one of the chamber's oldest members and third in line to the presidency-recently told Politico.
Where they want to get is here: They do not get blamed next year for chaos in the health-insurance market, and, sometime maybe next year, they come up with a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare that neutralizes Republican governors like Hutchinson who want to preserve Medicaid funding and appeases sufficiently Collins, Murkowski and McCain that it actually passes.
Now health care markets are collapsing.
"President Trump sowing uncertainty by threatening these ACA payments is hurting people, " said Meaghan Smith, a spokeswoman for the Protect Our Care Coalition, a group dedicated to preserving Obamacare.
However, in reality, everyone will need health care at some stage of his life.
That ended, though, in the Republican wave election of 2010, when the kind of closely divided districts typically held by Blue Dogs went overwhelmingly Republican. But that looks highly unlikely.
Experts fear many Americans who have relied on subsidized insurance will no longer be able to afford individual plans and insurance companies may simply choose to withdraw their plans from marketplaces altogether, only selling privately or to groups.
That challenge would be in addition to the pending battle to offset the list of tax cuts that the White House and congressional Republicans are hoping to make in tax reform.
On top of timeline issues are debates over how to pay for any potential package. "'I just am going to change the limit higher without changing any of my spending habits.' That's a tough sell to Republicans".
Tax reform means broadening the tax base - by taxing income that is now untaxed, through deductions - and reducing the rates. During the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, Republicans said, "See, we have ideas". If Trump can't get rid of all of Obamacare, it seems like he'll settle for getting rid of the parts of it that make it work.
Interestingly, though, some fiscal conservatives in the House showed openness to tax cuts without offsets, arguing that the cuts are needed for economic growth.
When it comes to premiums, it lets insurers charge whatever they want, and then gives people making 400 percent of the poverty level or less - $48,240 for individuals, or $98,400 for a family of four - whatever subsidy they need to keep this from being too much for them. Are the people aware that this year's enrollment will end on the 15th of December?
