Eliza Collins

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Republican senators return to Washington this week with the increasingly difficult task of pulling together a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare that can pass their chamber. After being faced with criticism from constituents at home and a fractured party back at the Capitol, some are conceding this is harder than they thought it would be.

"Look, I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win, I think most of my colleagues didn’t, so we didn’t expect to be in this situation,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said at a town hall in Harrisburg, Pa., on Wednesday.

"Given how difficult it is to get to a consensus, it was hard to force that until there was a need to," Toomey added.

GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley told constituents in Iowa on Friday that he wasn't even sure Republicans would be able to come up with a bill and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., straight up said he didn't think the bill would make it.

"My view is that it's probably going to be dead," McCain said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday.

Republicans have voted previously to repeal then-president Barack Obama’s signature health care law. But with Obama's ability to veto any bill, the move was largely symbolic.

Now that the GOP has a majority in both chambers and a Republican president, repealing the law is a very real possibility, and the House has already passed a bill of its own. But the Senate just can’t seem to agree on how to do it.

No Democrats are expected to vote for the bill, and Republicans have a narrow majority in the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday in Glasgow, Ky., that if the GOP couldn’t pull together the required 50 votes — they can lose a maximum of two GOP senators — they may have to work with Democrats on a fix to the current health care law.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and other top Democrats sent a letter to McConnell Monday urging him to abandon the health care bill and work on a bipartisan effort "to focus on common sense reforms to make the health care system more affordable and workable for American families."

Republican leaders had planned to bring the legislation up for a vote before lawmakers left for the July Fourth recess, but mounting opposition forced them to delay it. At least 10 GOP senators have said they cannot support the legislation in its current form, and another handful have expressed concerns.

Read more:

Here’s why it’s so hard to write health care legislation that will pass

Senate health care bill: Here's how it would affect you

If wary lawmakers had been hoping for some encouragement to support the bill over the break, they did not find it at home. Senators were confronted about the legislation all over the country, with some progressive activists conducting “sit-ins” at their offices and bringing it up during town halls and other events.

Sen. Susan Collins said she saw thew impact during her annual walk in the July Fourth parade in Eastport, Maine. Collins — who is one of the most moderate members of the Senate and has come out strongly against the current bill — said in past years people wanted to talk to her about a variety of topics. This year, she said, they were solely focused on health care.

“I heard, over and over again, encouragement for my stand against the current version of the Senate and House health-care bills,” Collins said, according to The Washington Post. "People were thanking me, over and over again. ‘Thank you, Susan!’ ‘Stay strong, Susan!’"

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's most recent analysis of the draft bill found that the Senate legislation would lead to 22 million fewer people with insurance by 2026 and save $321 billion from the deficit over the next decade.

Republican Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas — a reliably red state where President Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 21 points — said he's against the bill in its current form.

“I’m very interested in making sure pre-existing condition is covered and I wouldn’t consider it covered if it could be taken away in some other fashion,” Moran said at a town hall in Palco, Kan., on Thursday, according to Politico.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., who had been quiet about the legislation, came out against it at a roundtable in Grand Forks, N.D., on Wednesday, according to The Bismarck Tribune. North Dakota voted for Trump by 36 points.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Republican staff scrambled during the recess to tweak the bill so that it could satisfy both moderates and conservatives. One idea gaining steam is an amendment by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that would allow insurance companies to offer a bare-bones insurance option. A conservative GOP aide told USA TODAY that they were told Cruz’s amendment has been sent to the CBO for analysis.

Cruz has proposed allowing insurers to offer plans that don’t meet Obamacare coverage requirements, as long as they offer one that does include such requirements as minimum services and no annual or lifetime caps on benefit costs. The idea has gained praise from conservative lawmakers previously opposed to the Senate bill — such as Utah Sen. Mike Lee — but it is not clear whether moderates will be willing to support it.

The system would create two pools of customers, a healthy group that would buy the unregulated plans and a group needing health care.

While healthy customers would be able to buy much cheaper plans than they can now, premiums for the rest are likely to go up dramatically, experts say.

Coverage would likely be unaffordable for people who don’t qualify for subsidies, which is anyone earning more than about $41,580 under the Senate bill. For those who do qualify, the government would be on the hook for most of the higher premium costs because the bill — at least as currently written — caps the amount subsidized people have to pay based on their income.

“That would end up being way more than the federal government is spending now,” said Karen Pollitz, an expert on the private insurance market at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

That higher cost to taxpayers is expected to reflected in any analysis of the proposal by the CBO, which could lessen support for Cruz’s change.

Contributing: Maureen Groppe