When Mitch McConnell conceded that he didn’t have the votes to pass his Obamacare repeal bill, Republican leadership dismissed the wall dividing the G.O.P. as a speed bump. “We’re gonna see what we can do, we’re getting very close,” President Donald Trump said last week, shortly after McConnell announced that the Senate would take the July Fourth recess to find a new way forward. But now, as more Republicans open up about their concerns with the Better Care Reconciliation Act, McConnell’s bill doesn’t just look like it’s lost momentum—it seems to be on life support. And even the Senate majority leader is talking about scrapping his plan for a more bipartisan solution.

The past two weeks have seen a series of setbacks for the Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Multiple senators have said they can’t justify rolling back Obamacare’s investment taxes on the rich while slashing support for the poor. Moderates have said they can’t stomach major cuts to Medicaid. And a proposal from Ted Cruz that would allow insurers to also offer plans that don’t conform to A.C.A. standards—which was initially seen as a way to bridge the gulf between conservatives who want to gut Obamacare regulations and moderates who want to keep protections for pre-existing conditions—appears to have only deepened the divide.

Conservative senator Mike Lee has said that without the Cruz amendment he is a “no.” But with experts warning that the plan would lead to higher premiums for people in the more regulated pool, moderates have reportedly put their foot down. “I would say that if we voted on the Cruz proposal, it would be in the neighborhood of 37 to 15 against, 37 no votes and 15 yeses, and that’s probably generous,” a G.O.P. aide told The Hill. “Nobody wants to go home and say to a 45-year-old steelworker with diabetes that you should have to pay a lot more for your health insurance.” Senators Susan Collins and Dean Heller have signaled that they remain staunchly opposed to any plan that hurts their states’ vulnerable populations—a virtual certainty under the current Republican framework for overhauling the health-care system.

More recent developments suggest the Senate could scrap that framework entirely. For days, Senator Rand Paul has been calling on Republicans to do a “clean repeal” followed by a bipartisan “replace” effort. “You can have a simultaneous bill or a concurrent bill that they can call replace and that I think perhaps if it's big spending, they could probably get Democrats to go along with big spending,” he told Fox News on Sunday. “I’m not for that, but I’m saying, I want repeal to work, and the way you do it is you separate into two bills and you do it concurrently.”

It’s a high-risk, high-reward concept that appears to be gaining traction. Shortly after Paul’s pronouncement, Trump—who has reportedly been back-channeling with the Kentucky senator—tweeted, “If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!” Senator Ben Sasse made a similar argument during an interview with CNN. “I’d like to say let’s do the repeal and then let’s try to get 60 out of 100 senators,” the Nebraska senator said. Jerry Moran, a typically reliable G.O.P. vote, also seemed to back the idea for a bipartisan plan during a town hall on Thursday. Moran told his constituents that it is “almost impossible to try to solve” the health-care debate roiling Washington with just Republican votes and said it would be preferable to “figure out where there are 60 votes to pass something that is so important to many Americans,” Politico reports.