A last-minute push to pass Republican legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare on Thursday threatened to sidetrack a bipartisan deal on a federal spending plan to avoid a government shutdown.
"Instead of rushing through healthcare," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters late Thursday, The Washington Post reported, "they first ought to get the government funded for a full year — plain and simple."
Schumer's comments came as House Republicans leaders, under pressure from the White House, worked to gauge support for a vote on a revised healthcare plan Friday.
The reworked legislation would let states escape an Obamacare requirement that insurers charge healthy and seriously ill customers the same rates.
They could also be exempted from the mandate to provide certain core services and from certain pre-existing conditions.
The revised bill was backed by the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which bitterly opposed the original American Health Care Act last month.
Democrats said Thursday that they would withdraw their support for the spending bill, which would keep the government open past midnight on Friday, if the healthcare plan is scheduled for a vote, the Post reported.
Senators in both parties told reporters Thursday night that they were instructed not to leave Washington.
The spending measure would only keep the government open for one week, the Post reports, while legislators work on a bill to keep agencies operating through September.
Republicans have said they need Democratic support to pass the longer spending measure – and it could be considered next week.
"If Republicans pursue this partisan path of forcing Americans to pay more for less and destabilizing our county’s health-care system," House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland told the Post, then "Republicans should be prepared to [keep the government open] on their own."
A 16-day partial shutdown in 2013 cost American taxpayers $1.4 billion.
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