Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) on Sunday said that the Senate will have to get the right “kind of score” from the Congressional Budget Office to pass the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare — unlike the House, which passed a version of the measure last week without a new CBO score.
“Presumably you will read what you’re working on and actually get a Congressional Budget Office score? The House didn’t wait,” Andrea Mitchell asked Blunt on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“Well, we will, and from the House’s perspective, you know, they added a few things late, but this is not a new issue,” Blunt said. “The Senate is going to have to have the kind of score they need to move this forward.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Sunday brushed off criticism of the rush to vote on the measure without a score as “a bogus attack from the left.”
“The most recent CBO score showed that we’re perfectly in compliance with the Senate budget rules, which is what matters here,” he said, referring to a previous iteration of the bill.
In its report on the first version of the repeal, the CBO also estimated that 24 million people would lose their insurance over the next 10 years if the bill passed.
President Donald Trump on Sunday nevertheless pointedly predicted that “Republican Senators will not let the American people down.”
