Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell said Republican senators were meeting three times a week to work on health care. | Getty
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday declined to put a timeline on passing health care legislation, but said the Senate “can’t take forever” on it.
“We can’t take forever,” McConnell told Bloomberg TV, citing instability in the individual insurance market. “I don’t think we have forever to address this, but I’m not going to put a strict timeline on it.”
House Republicans passed a revised version of their proposal to repeal and replace parts of the Affordable Care Act earlier this month, after a failed attempt in late March. That bill is likely too conservative to pass the Senate, and lawmakers in the upper chamber have since been working on their own version of the legislation.
McConnell told Bloomberg that Republican senators are currently in “intense” meetings on health care three days a week.
“It wasn’t easy in the House, and it won’t be any easier in the Senate,” McConnell said.
Asked if he could guarantee that no one would lose insurance coverage under any reform package, McConnell dodged, offering instead that “what we have now is a disaster.”
“The status quo is unacceptable and we need to do better than the status quo,” he said.
[“Source-politico”]
