A complicated tax overhaul debate got more complicated Tuesday when Senate Republicans injected health care politics into the equation.

With a growing number of Senate Republicans seeking bigger tax cuts for individuals and families, but short of ways to finance it, GOP leaders gave the go-ahead to repeal the 2010 health care law’s mandate to purchase insurance to pay for their wish list.

“We’re optimistic that inserting the individual mandate repeal would be helpful and that’s obviously the view of the Senate Finance Committee Republicans as well,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday after the weekly policy lunch.

One of his deputies, Republican Conference Chairman John Thune, said repeal of the health care law’s mandate would be part of a modified version of the tax overhaul the Finance panel released last week.

“Yeah, it’ll be distributed in the form of middle-income tax relief, it will give us even more of an opportunity to really distribute the relief to those middle-income cohorts who could really benefit from it,” said the South Dakota Republican, who is on the tax-writing committee.