Article snippet: Posted at 4:00 am on July 28, 2017 by Joe Cunningham It appears that any chance of repealing (and replacing?) the Affordable Care Act died last night as Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins were joined by John McCain in opposing the Senate’s “skinny repeal” bill. Here’s how it went down. Yesterday afternoon, the Senate voted against a straight repeal of the Affordable Care Act. It was a floor vote Mitch McConnell had promised after the failure of a joint repeal-and-replace bill last week, when defections from both the conservative and the moderate wings of the GOP caucus killed it before it reached a vote. With both repeal-and-replace and the full repeal bills dead in the water, it was time for Plan C (or D or E or X at this point): “Skinny Repeal.” “Skinny Repeal” was a frankly terrible bill that would get rid of some of the more problematic aspects of Obamacare, but come nowhere close to a full repeal. The idea was that taking awake the individual mandate and the employer mandate, but leaving everything else for the time being, would have been enough to make sure the conservatives and the moderates were all on board. But, it did not happen. The CBO almost immediately announced 16 million more people would go uninsured (because they would not be forced to buy insurance, but semantics and all that) and insurance companies complained skinny repeal would be disastrous for the market. As a result, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and John McCain voted against the skin... Link to the full article to read more