Senate Republicans are shying away from former President Donald Trump's call to take another shot at repealing the Affordable Care Act as Democrats lean into the healthcare law.
Mr. Trump took to social media to renew calls for the replacement of the ACA last fall after a stretch of time in which the healthcare law was not a central issue in U.S. political campaigns.
At the time, the message caught numerous Republican lawmakers off guard. Now, Republican senators have told The Hill that calls to repeal the ACA — known as Obamacare — are not worth the squeeze.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., and other senior Senate Republicans are breaking with the Republican presidential nominee and signaling the war on Obamacare is over.
"The Affordable Care Act, at least in a lot of the provisions, is probably, whether we like it or not, here to stay," Mr. Thune told The Hill.
"People have moved to a different place," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. "If you were to walk into the room and say my number one priority is to repeal and replace Obamacare, I think you're going to have half the people say, 'What? Why? Huh?' It is not the rallying cry it once was," she said. "Let's not walk that plank again."
President Joe Biden's reelection team indicated this fall that the White House was prepared to make the ACA a focal point of the 2024 campaign. Mr. Biden spoke about the law in his State of the Union March 7, crediting it for protecting health insurance for more than 100 million people with pre-existing conditions.
"But my predecessor and many in this chamber want to take that protection away by repealing the Affordable Care Act; I won't let that happen. We stopped you 50 times before and we will stop you again," President Biden said.
The president's latest budget builds on the ACA, making expanded premium tax credits that the Inflation Reduction Act extended permanent and providing Medicaid-like coverage in the 10 states that have not adopted Medicaid expansion, paired with financial incentives to ensure states maintain their existing expansions.
The ACA is the most challenged statute in American history, including its seven Supreme Court challenges in a decade, according to professors at Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University. Most recently, in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to the ACA, in which plaintiffs argued that the law should be struck down due to the 2017 elimination of the ACA's tax penalty.
As of February, about 6 in 10 U.S. adults hold a favorable opinion of the ACA while about 4 in 10 hold a negative opinion of the law, according to KFF.