With the July Fourth recess looming, Mitch McConnell and Republican leadership spent Thursday scrambling to cobble together a revised version of their bill to repeal and replace Obamacare before leaving Capitol Hill on Friday for 10 days. But with every concession made to one faction of his caucus, McConnell seemed to lose another. Still, Democrats aren’t ready to hope that the divisions within the G.O.P. are so deep that McConnell won’t find a way to wrangle the 50 votes he needs to pass his Better Care Reconciliation Act.

“A vote on the Senate Republican health plan was scheduled to happen as early as this week, but they canceled it because Americans are speaking out against the bill,” Senator Al Franken said in a statement to the Hive, before cautiously adding, “But let me be clear—this is not cause for a victory lap.” And Senator Trent Lott, a former majority leader and Senate whip, is still betting on McConnell to get the bill across the finish line. “Mitch McConnell is a master of the rules of the Senate. He is very good at trying to find a solution,” Lott said in an interview with the Hive. “And to me, it is not as complicated as it might look right now.”

Passing a bill that can unite Senate conservatives and moderates, and then survive a vote in the House, will be a heavy lift. A report from the Congressional Budget Office revealed earlier this week that the B.C.R.A. would do little to lower insurance costs for the middle class, and would result in 22 million more individuals dropping or losing insurance coverage over the next decade, largely due to its steep cuts to the Medicaid program. At the same time, the unpopular bill would provide a windfall of $541 billion in tax cuts to insurance companies and society’s most affluent. Faced with the political ramifications of such a trade-off, a growing chorus of Republican senators this week began publicly questioning the law’s underlying redistribution of wealth. “It’s not equitable to have a situation where you’re increasing the burden on lower-income citizens and lessening the burden on wealthy citizens,” Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee said. “That’s not a proposition that is sustainable, and I think leadership knows that.”

But Lott, sounding much like McConnell, makes a transactional case, arguing that to get to 50 votes, McConnell only needs to make the right deals with the right senators. This is precisely what the majority leader was attempting to achieve on Thursday. To appease wary moderates—particularly those representing states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and have been ravaged by the opioid crisis, such as Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia—G.O.P. leadership and the White House agreed to allocate an additional $45 billion over 10 years toward the drug epidemic. Discussions are also ongoing about a proposal from Susan Collins to keep the 3.8 percent Obamacare tax on investment and capital gains, which the Maine senator argued has no impact on the cost of health-care coverage but provides roughly $172 billion in revenue that could be used to supplement aid to the lower and middle class. “I distinguish between those tax increases that were part of Obamacare that increase premiums and the cost of health care versus those that do not,” Collins, an early and vocal opponent of the bill, said.

But while keeping the investment tax—which affects individuals making more than $200,000 per year and couples exceeding $250,000 in joint annual income—might win over centrists concerned about the optics of repealing taxes on the wealthy, it could prompt “no” votes from their more conservative peers. “We pledged that we would repeal Obamacare. I don’t remember anybody going around saying, ‘Oh, except for these job-killing tax increases,’ ” Senator Patrick Toomey said of maintaining the investment tax. “So I expect that we’ll be repealing all of the taxes in Obamacare.” And John Thune of South Dakota suggested that not repealing all the A.C.A. taxes could cost McConnell the votes he needs. “It’s not a big number, but it’s enough,” Thune, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, told Politico.