Schumer: Bipartisan health care bill ‘has a majority’
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday that the Alexander-Murray bipartisan health care bill has support from a majority of senators, and he urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring it to the floor “immediately.”
“This is a good compromise. It took months to work out. It has a majority. It has 60 senators supporting it. We have all 48 Democrats, 12 Republicans,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “I would urge Senator McConnell to put it on the floor immediately, this week. It will pass and it will pass by a large number of votes.”
Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) announced this past week that they had reached an agreement on a Obamacare deal which would fund a key insurance subsidy program. The deal is meant to allow for some breathing room for the system amid attempts to improve or replace it.
Schumer said President Donald Trump originally urged lawmakers to come up with a bipartisan health care fix, but he added that the president’s reluctance to support the bipartisan bill comes after the “right wing” attacked it.
“The Republicans are in charge, and they should be coming up with a solution and Senator Alexander, their leader on health care did,” Schumer said.
“We can get together in a bipartisan way, the president urged it originally. He called both Senators Murray and Alexander and said, ‘Come to a solution.’ Then they come to a solution. The right wing attacks it, and he backs off. That’s not leadership.”
McConnell said on Sunday during an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” that he would bring the bill to the floor only if Trump would sign it. Trump has called the bill a “short-term fix” and has urged lawmakers to go further.