Sen. Bill Cassidy cited a Thursday closed-door Republican lunch as a turning point in favor of the bill. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Cassidy says he's close to having the votes to pass Obamacare repeal

Sen. Bill Cassidy Friday sought to rally support for the last-ditch Obamacare repeal plan he co-authored, saying he believes he’s on the verge of winning the final votes needed to jam it through the Senate.

Cassidy claims that as many as 49 GOP senators have expressed support but doesn't have a hard whip count with just days left to use a fast-track process allowing the bill to pass with a simply majority. And his search for the elusive 50 "aye" votes got harder Thursday, when Sen. Rand Paul announced his opposition.


“I can’t support a bill that keeps 90 percent of Obamacare in place,” Paul tweeted, panning the plan crafted by Cassidy and Lindsey Graham as “Obamacare lite.”

That leaves Cassidy and Graham with the slimmest margin for error. With Democrats unified against any attempt to dismantle Obamacare, Republicans can only absorb two defections and still have Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking vote in favor of the bill. That means the measure needs the backing of at least two of the three senators — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain — who opposed the GOP’s last attempt at repeal.

McCain has expressed some support for the Cassidy-Graham bill, but also cautioned that any repeal effort go through the regular committee process. Collins told reporters on Wednesday that she’s still reviewing the legislation but is skeptical of any plan that cuts funding to Planned Parenthood.

“I’ve got a lot of questions about it,” she said. “And obviously the Planned Parenthood defunding is problematic.”

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Cassidy cited a Thursday closed-door Republican lunch as a turning point in favor of the bill.

“I’m pretty confident we’ll get there on the Republican side,” he said, calling the midweek discussion what "may have been my best day as a senator."

“We’re probably at 48, 49, and talking to two or three more," he said.

An aide to Cassidy said later that they still believe there’s a path to 50 votes, even without Paul’s support.

Cassidy and Graham are also expecting Senate Republican leadership and possibly President Donald Trump to lend support in the coming days, to push it over the finish line.

“I’m hoping that the president will show the same enthusiasm to repeal Obamacare that President Obama showed to pass it,” Graham said on Wednesday.

But doing it all before the end of the month remains a long shot. The CBO has not yet scored the bill’s effects, and senators are still sorting through how their states would fare under legislation that would dismantle Obamacare in favor of sending block grants to individual states.

Under the legislation, rural states and those that didn't expand their Medicaid programs would largely receive more funding for health care. But the states that have been most successful so far in getting people covered stand to see billions of dollars in funding cuts.

“At some point, you have to ask Massachusetts to control their costs,” Cassidy said.

The Louisiana Republican preemptively dismissed any CBO calculations showing coverage losses, arguing the agency puts too much faith in Obamacare’s individual mandate, and that his plan would incentivize governors to get more residents covered.

CBO's reports played a large part in derailing the GOP's previous repeal bills, after moderate Republicans balked at projections showing millions more would go uninsured compared with Obamacare.

“I just don’t care about the coverage numbers, because their methodology has proven to be wrong,” he said of CBO. “And ours, frankly, empirically, is correct.”

Cassidy also waved off concerns that under the Cassidy-Graham bill, federal funding to states would need to be periodically reauthorized. Budget restrictions prevent him from funding the block grants beyond 2026, he said, expressing confidence that Congress would keep the money flowing in the same way it’s continually agreed to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

If he fails to get 50 senators on board by the end of September, Cassidy pledged to continue working toward repeal — even if his own party is ready to move onto other issues.

“If we don’t get it through now, we’d like to do it in the future,” he said. “But we are thinking we can get this done by Sept. 30.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect the correct day of the closed-door Republican meeting.