Summary
Shortly after House passage of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), it quickly became clear that the Senate plans to chart their own path forward on healthcare reform – rather than moving to advance the version drafted in the lower chamber. “We’ll be informed by what the House did,” HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said. “But we’ll write a Senate bill, it’ll get a [CBO] score so we’ll know what the cost is, and then we’ll vote.” Further, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already assembled a 13-person intra-party working group representing different factions of the caucus – and the group has already met twice.