Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans will try again to repeal Obamacare if they have the votes to do so after the November midterm elections.
“If we had the votes to completely start over, we’d do it,” he told Reuters on Wednesday. “But that depends on what happens in a couple weeks… We’re not satisfied with the way Obamacare is working.”
The GOP’s efforts under President Trump to overturn the Affordable Care Act crashed in July of last summer after a dramatic vote rejected the repeal bill by just one no vote, that of recently deceased Republican Senator John McCain.
Republicans managed to scrap Obamacare’s penalty for the uninsured in the tax cuts bill they passed last December.
That failure, an embarrassment for the majority leader, is “the one disappointment of this Congress from a Republican point of view,” the Kentucky senator said.
“That’s the one place we came up short, and I’d like to finish the job,” he said earlier this week.
Democrats need two Senate seats and 23 House seats to win control of Congress on November 6. They are not favored to win the Senate, but their forecast looks more promising in the lower chamber.
President Trump supports repealing Obamacare, which insures close to 20 million Americans.
“Americans should take Senator McConnell at his word,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement after McConnell’s comments. “If Republicans retain the Senate they will do everything they can to take away families’ health care and raise their costs, whether it be eliminating protections for pre-existing conditions, repealing the health care law, or cutting Medicare and Medicaid.”