Yesterday, Donald Trump invited all the Republican senators to have lunch with him at the White House. The purpose of the lunch was to revive the Senate health plan to "repeal and replace" Obamacare -- a plan that had dies an ignominious death just a couple of days before because it couldn't get enough Republicans to back it.
While trying to revive the plan, Trump piled huge praise on it -- saying it would lower insurance premiums, provide better care for more people, and would "save" Medicaid. Those were all lies. As the CBO scoring has already shown, the GOP's Senate version of Trumpcare would actually raise insurance premiums significantly (because it would remove the individual and employer mandates), would throw millions of people off insurance rolls, and many of those would be the poor who need Medicaid (and couldn't afford to buy private insurance).
The senators would do well to ignore Trump, and pay attention to what the public wants. About 58% say they want to keep Obamacare and fix it, while only 35% say they want it repealed and replaced. And when you just look at the latest version of Trumpcare, only 20% support it while 57% oppose it.
But that last chart may be the one that bothers GOP senators the most. It shows that 53% of voters say they would be less likely to vote for anyone who voted for Trumpcare. A vote for Trumpcare would not be well received by voters in the next election.
The charts above are from the latest Public Policy Polling survey -- done between July 14th and 17th of a random national sample of 836 registered voters, with a margin of error of 3.4 points.
