"I can not support a piece of legislation that takes insurance away from tens of millions of Americans and tens of thousands of Nevadans", Heller said.
"I've done in five months what other people haven't done in years", Trump said in an interview that aired Friday on Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends".
Beyond the Medicaid cuts, Heller also said he was also concerned with the Senate bill's rollback, via waivers, of Obamacare's Essential Health Benefits.
The claim that the bill would lower consumers' insurance premiums was "a lie", he said.
Sen. Johnson wants a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but he said this new legislation is being rushed through the Senate. "Dean Heller, who on Friday came out against the Senate's Obamacare repeal bill without significant changes", Politico reports.
No Republican senators definitively said they would vote against the bill, instead focusing attention on the provisions that would need to be changed to earn their vote.
Difficult, because several hospital and medical associations and the AARP also oppose the bill.
Vehicle bomb in southwest Pakistan kills at least 11, wounds 20
Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group abducted and killed two Chinese nationals in Quetta last month. Footage of the incident showed two vehicles badly damaged in the explosion, while debris lay scattered on the street.
GOP Sens. Rob Portman of OH and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia also expressed concerns about the bill's cuts to Medicaid and drug addiction efforts. It also prompted an outcry from centrist senators and medical organizations anxious that it takes on the law, known as Obamacare, too aggressively and would lead to millions losing their health care or receiving fewer benefits...
In a speech Thursday from the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., characterized the ACA as a failure that "teeters, literally teeters, on the edge of total collapse".
Previous scores of the House version have predicted $119 billion in cost savings compared to Obamacare, but also 23 million fewer people with coverage in the next decade. Now, the uninsured rate may start climbing again, because both the House and Senate bills cut federal financing and repeal an unpopular requirement to carry health insurance.
But doctors see a health insurance card as a ticket into the system, so patients can be screened for chronic conditions that can ultimately lead to serious illnesses. It did not sound like a lengthier phase-out of the Medicaid expansion would satisfy Heller the way it might satisfy, say, Ohio Sen.
To date, Wisconsin taxpayers have spent $679 million more than they would have under a full expansion of Medicaid, the Legislature's nonpartisan budget office has estimated. They said the measure missed delivering a GOP promise to Americans "to repeal Obamacare and lower their health care costs".
Heller is up for re-election in 2018 and is considered one of the most vulnerable GOP senators.
- Gives each state a fixed amount of Medicaid funding, forcing states to make cuts when money runs out.
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