The GOP's Healthcare Bill Is So Heinous That Even Republicans Don't Want to Back It

Even before Congress’ nonpartisan number-crunchers revealed that the Republican healthcare bill would leave 22 million more Americans without health insurance by 2026, GOP senators were running away from their own bill. But the Congressional Budget Office’s dire prognostications about the impact of the Better Care Reconciliation Act made the bill’s passage even dicier.

As of late Monday, at least six Republican senators had staked out their opposition to the BCRA. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Susan Collins of Maine, and Rand Paul of Kentucky said they would vote against opening debate on the bill in its current form today, the Washington Post reported. Dean Heller, of Nevada, declared his opposition to the bill last week. Sen. Ted Cruz (of Texas) and Sen. Mike Lee (of Utah) are also on the record as having issues with the current bill.

Johnson, widely viewed as one of the nation’s most vulnerable senators up for re-election, penned a New York Times op-ed on Monday headlined “Where the Health Care Bill Fails.” Collins, a member of the party’s somewhat less extreme wing, tweeted that the Senate bill would “hurt [the] most vulnerable Americans” and further hit “already struggling” hospitals in her home state.

But none of this has stopped Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s vow to get the bill to a vote by July 4. He took to the Senate floor early on Monday to insist that the bill had already been adjusted in an effort to assuage senators’ concerns.

WHAT ELSE?

• Donald Trump, president of the United States, is waging war on CNN from his verified Twitter feed over the network’s retracting a story related to Russia.

• Speaking of the president, he officially announced he would nominate Christopher Wray, a former top federal prosecutor, to be the next director of the FBI.

WHAAAAAT?

• The latest update to Britain’s Oxford English Dictionary will include “woke,” as in “stay woke,” and “post-truth.” The linguistic gatekeepers citing the 2008 Erykah Badu song “Master Teacher,” which includes the lyrics “I stay woke” with first helping to popularize the social justice meaning of the word.