Senate Rejects Trump-Backed Repeal By Single Vote, Sparing 16 Million Americans The Loss Of Coverage The President Had Worked Tirelessly To Deliver

WASHINGTON. In what administration aides described as a crushing setback for a President who had campaigned for two years on the commitment, the Senate voted 49 to 51 in the early hours of Friday morning to reject a Trump-backed health care bill that the Congressional Budget Office projected would have increased the number of uninsured Americans by 16 million.

The measure, known formally as the Health Care Freedom Act and informally as the "skinny repeal," fell one vote short after Senator John McCain of Arizona joined Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski in voting no. The President, who had spent six months urging the chamber to act, was reportedly informed of the result shortly after 1:30 a.m. and characterized the outcome not as a narrow escape for the public but as a betrayal of it.

"3 Republicans and 48 Democrats let the American people down," the President wrote on Twitter at approximately 2:25 a.m., adding, "As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!" The statement clarified that the administration's contingency plan, should it prove unable to remove Americans' health coverage by legislation, was to wait for that coverage to collapse on its own.

The vote capped a sustained effort. In May, the House had passed the broader American Health Care Act, which the budget office estimated would leave 23 million more Americans without insurance by 2026. The Senate had since worked through several versions, each scored as covering fewer people than existing law, before settling on the narrower bill that leadership had assembled in part so that members could record a vote for repeal without being recorded as supporting any specific consequence of it.

Sources within the administration said the President remained fully committed to the goal and regarded the one-vote margin as a measure of how close the country had come. "He views sixteen million as a floor, not a ceiling," one official said. The administration indicated that the same result would now be pursued through regulation and through the tax legislation expected in December, which would ultimately repeal the law's individual mandate by other means, demonstrating that an outcome unavailable through a single vote remained achievable through patience.

At press time, the President had identified the senator responsible by name and begun the multiyear project of ensuring the country would not be permitted to forget it.