Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) officially lost his bid to pass an overhaul of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, late Monday as a third Republican senator announced her defection from his bill and brought the Senate’s desperate, 11th hour effort to repeal the ACA to a grinding halt – again.
That senator was the very lawmaker who had co-sponsored a health-care bill with Cassidy earlier this year: Maine’s Susan Collins. And it is also the one whose state would have gotten more funding under a new version of Cassidy-Graham, which Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump hoped to vote on this week. Now, that's very unlikely to happen.
Cassidy told me earlier in the day that if Collins just looked at his bill – which he’d tweaked over the weekend resulting in $1 billion more federal healthcare dollars for her state – she could be convinced to support it. Maybe Collins could even help implement the measure if she decides to run for Maine’s governor in 2018, he suggested.
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