WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump on Sunday said he doesn't think Senate Republicans are "that far off" on a health care overhaul to replace "the dead carcass of Obamacare," signaling that last-minute changes will help the bill win enough support for passage.
But others in the GOP expressed doubt over the likelihood of a successful vote this week.
Five Republican senators -- Ted Cruz of Texas, Dean Heller of Nevada, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky -- have said they cannot support the bill in its current form. Paul said he is opposing the bill because it "is not anywhere close to repeal" of President Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He says the bill offers too many subsidies to help poorer people buy insurance.
Paul said his goal is to repeal the Affordable Care Act outright, though he understood Republicans' need to get 50 votes.
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"If we get to impasse, if we go to a bill that is more repeal and less big government programs, yes, I'll consider partial repeal," he said on ABC's This Week. "I'm not voting for something that looks just like Obamacare."
Heller has said the bill cuts coverage too deeply. The other four senators have said the bill does not do enough to control health care costs.
Trump signaled a willingness to deal.
"We have a very good plan," Trump said in a Fox & Friends interview taped Friday and broadcast Sunday on Fox News. Referring to Republican senators opposed to the bill, he added: "They want to get some points, I think they'll get some points."
[INTERACTIVE: Compare new health care bill with Affordable Care Act]
Five GOP votes are more than enough to halt the measure developed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. That's because unanimous opposition is expected from Democrats in a chamber in which Republicans hold a 52-48 majority and can only afford to lose two votes.
"It would be so great if the Democrats and Republicans could get together, wrap their arms around it and come up with something that everybody's happy with," Trump said. "And I'm open arms; but, I don't see that happening. They fight each other. The level of hostility."
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said Trump "is working the phones, he's having personal meetings, and he's engaging with leaders."
"The president and the White House are also open to getting Democratic votes," Conway said on CNN's State of the Union. "Why can't we get a single Democrat to come to the table, to come to the White House, to speak to the president or anyone else about trying to improve a system that has not worked for everyone?"
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But Democratic support seems unlikely. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., speaking on ABC's This Week, said Democrats would only sit down with Republicans if they stop trying repeal the Affordable Care Act. In an interview with The Washington Post, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., spoke of trying to postpone a vote on the bill to mount a stronger fight against it.
"One of the strategies is to just keep offering amendments, to delay this thing and delay this thing at least until after the July Fourth break," Sanders said. "That would give us the opportunity to rally the American people in opposition to it. I think we should use every tactic that we can to delay this thing."
'Bill with heart'
In the broadcast interview, Trump did not indicate what types of changes to the Senate bill may be in store, but he affirmed that he had described a House-passed bill as "mean."
"I want to see a bill with heart," he said. "Health care's a very complicated subject from the standpoint that you move it this way, and this group doesn't like it. You move it a little bit over here -- you have a very narrow path. And, honestly, nobody can be totally happy."
Trump said he thinks Republicans in the Senate are doing the best they can to push through the bill.
"I don't think they're that far off. Famous last words, right? But I think they're going to get there," Trump said. "We don't have too much of a choice, because the alternative is the dead carcass of Obamacare."
McConnell has said he's willing to make changes to win support. He is seeking to push a final package through the Senate before the July 4 recess.
At least two GOP senators said Sunday that goal may prove too ambitious.
"I would like to delay the thing," Johnson said on NBC's Meet the Press. "There's no way we should be voting on this next week. No way."
Johnson said the bill wouldn't address "the root cause" of rising health care costs. "They're doing the same old Washington thing, throwing more money at the problem."
However, he added, "I will look at whatever I'm forced to vote on, and I'll ask myself, 'Is this better tomorrow than where we are today? Is it continuous improvement?' And that's what will guide my decision."
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who criticized the secretive process by which the new bill was crafted and had preferred his own compromise to extend most of the Affordable Care Act, said he was undecided, though he clarified that small changes could win his vote.
"There are things in this bill that adversely affect my state that are peculiar to my state," Cassidy said on Face the Nation. "If those can be addressed, I will. If they can't be addressed, I won't. So right now, I am undecided."
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said seven to eight other senators including herself were troubled by provisions that she believes could cut Medicaid even more than the House version.
Collins, who also opposes proposed cuts to Planned Parenthood, said she would await an analysis today from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office before taking a final position on the bill. But she said it will be "extremely difficult" for the White House to be able to find a narrow path to attract both conservatives and moderates.
"It's hard for me to see the bill passing this week," Collins said on This Week.
But the Senate's No. 2 Republican said Sunday that passing a health care bill won't get any easier if Republican leaders delay a Senate vote. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said there is "a sense of urgency" to push forward but acknowledged the outcome is "going to be close."
He told reporters at a private gathering hosted by industrialist Charles Koch in Colorado that Trump will be "important" in securing the final votes.
Part of the reason for the urgency is Republicans' desire to move on to tax legislation later this summer.
"It's not going to get any easier," Cornyn said. "And, yes, I think August is the drop deadline, about August 1."
Bill's foes
Top lieutenants in the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers' conservative political network sharply criticized the legislation over the weekend, saying it was insufficiently conservative and did not do enough to rein in the growth of Medicaid.
Much of the nation's $3 trillion health care industry also opposes the bill. A number of Republican governors have joined doctors, hospitals and patient advocacy groups as critics of the bill, in part because of its cuts to Medicaid.
Progressive activists spent the weekend warning that Republicans such as Johnson and Cassidy could vote for the bill with minor tweaks. In Columbus, Ohio, at the second of three rallies Sanders and MoveOn.org organized to pressure swing-state Republican senators, MoveOn's Washington director, Ben Wikler, warned a crowd of at least 1,000 activists that the protests of Senate Republicans might not mean much.
"This is the week when Mitch McConnell and Republicans are going to introduce these tiny amendments and Republicans are going to say, 'Oh, the bill is fixed! Oh, I can vote for it now!'" Wikler said.
The Senate bill resembles legislation the House approved last month. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House measure predicts an additional 23 million people over the next decade would have no health care coverage.
The legislation would phase out extra federal money that more than 30 states receive for expanding Medicaid to additional low-income earners. It would also put annual spending caps on the overall Medicaid program, which since its inception in 1965 has provided states with unlimited money to cover eligible costs.
The bill would also redistribute federal Medicaid money from higher-spending states like New York to lower spending states like Alabama.
However, the paragraph that requires that redistribution has a qualifier: "This paragraph shall not apply to any state that has a population density of less than 15 individuals per square mile." Only five states -- Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming -- meet that criterion. The qualifier is designed to help Alaska, where both Republican senators have expressed concern about the bill's potential effect. Premiums on Alaska's insurance exchange average about $1,000 a month for an individual, according to federal data.
There was talk over the weekend among key GOP figures about wooing moderates by doing more to alter the bill's Medicaid changes, according to two people involved who would not speak publicly. By tweaking how federal funding is determined for Medicaid recipients and linking aspects to the medical component of the consumer price index, there is a belief that some moderates could be swayed, since they want assurances that funding would keep up with any rises in the cost of care, the people said.
However, several conservatives are warning that unless their amendments are also included, they are unlikely to support the legislation. The hope is that a combination of those Medicaid changes and amendments from conservatives could pave the way to passage.
According to a White House official, Trump advisers are also keeping in close touch with the conservative House Freedom Caucus, the group that helped wreck the White House's initial health care push. Their goal is to ensure that whatever ends up passing could pass muster with House conservatives.
Information for this article was contributed by Hope Yen and Steve Peoples of The Associated Press; Ashley Parker, David Weigel, Robert Costa and James Hohmann of The Washington Post; and by Robert Pear, Thomas Kaplan, Matt Flegenheimer and Noah Weiland of The New York Times.
A Section on 06/26/2017