Playbook: “Republicans have been talking about repealing Obamacare for six years, and this week they are finally poised to take up their legislation. One problem: it’s unclear if they have anywhere near the support they need to get the bill through. Expect a lot of arm twisting and drama over the next several days. President Donald Trump will play a support role.”

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s allies have sent signals that he is going to put the bill up for a vote even if he doesn’t expect it to pass. But Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters in Colorado Springs that Aug. 1 is the real final deadline.”

“If it looks like this bill will pass, there’s a chance the House will stick around to try to take action. Senior Republicans we talk to tell us they’d want to try to take advantage of the political momentum. But there’s still serious doubt this bill can pass the House.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) rips the GOP health care bill in  a New York Times op-ed:

Speaking at a rally for his wife’s presidential campaign last year, Bill Clinton called Obamacare ‘the craziest thing in the world.’ As he put it, ‘The people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.’ Mr. Clinton was right, and it’s why Republicans have been pushing to repair the damage done by Obamacare for so long. Our priority should be to bring relief, and better, less expensive care, to millions of working men and women.

Unfortunately, the Senate Republican alternative, unveiled last week, doesn’t appear to come close to addressing their plight. Like Obamacare, it relies too heavily on government spending, and ignores the role that the private sector can and should play. … Republican leaders have told us the plan unveiled last week is a draft, open to discussion and improvement. I look forward to working with Senate leadership and the president to improve the bill so it addresses the plight of the forgotten men and women by returning freedom and choice to health care.

Playbook: “Johnson seems to be voicing pretty fundamental concerns with the GOP bill. His issues don’t appear to be easily solvable with a tweak or two. That is a problem for Senate Republicans.”

President Trump accused former President Barack Obama of stealing his terminology when Obama said last week that there was a “fundamental meanness” at the core of the Republican health care bill, CNN reports.

Said Trump: “Well he actually used my term, ‘mean.’ That was my term. Because I want to see — and I speak from the heart — that’s what I want to see, I want to see a bill with heart.”

“Senate Republican leaders scrambled Sunday to rally support for their health care bill even as opposition continued to build outside Congress and two Republican senators questioned whether the bill would be approved this week,” the New York Times reports.

“Senate Republican leaders were trying to lock down Republican votes by funneling money to red states, engineering a special deal for Alaska and arguing that they could insure more people at a lower cost than the House, which passed a repeal bill last month. But the forces arrayed against the Republican push to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement are formidable.”

Washington Post: “At least five Republicans have already come out against their party’s bill — which can only afford to lose two votes — and over the weekend more began expressing serious reservations and skepticism about the proposal, saying they would like more time to debate and tweak the plan.”

Mike Allen: “At least 10 Republican senators have expressed reservations, and the White House and GOP leaders can only lose two. That’s why our handicappers have suddenly gone from ‘more likely than not’ to ‘coin flip.'”

Washington Post: “A small group of moderate Republican senators, worried that their leaders’ health-care bill could damage the nation’s social safety net, may pose at least as significant an obstacle to the measure’s passage as their colleagues on the right. The vast changes the legislation would make to Medicaid, the country’s broadest source of public health insurance, would represent the largest single step the government has ever taken toward conservatives’ long-held goal of reining in federal spending on health-care entitlement programs in favor of a free-market system.”

“That dramatic shift and the bill’s bold redistribution of wealth — the billions of dollars taken from coverage for the poor would help fund tax cuts for the wealthy — is creating substantial anxiety for several Republican moderates whose states have especially benefited from the expansion of Medicaid that the Affordable Care Act has allowed since 2014.”

For members: The Senators Who Will Decide the Health Care Fight

Politico: “The most hardline conservatives in the House are taking an unusually cautious approach to the Senate’s Obamacare replacement, promising to keep an open mind about whatever their colleagues across the Capitol send back. It’s a change in strategy for the House Freedom Caucus. When House leaders first released a health care bill in February, for instance, group members took to television talk shows to pan the plan as ‘Obamacare lite,’ furious that it didn’t, in their eyes, do enough to unravel the 2010 health care law.

“They also threatened to withhold their support until changes were made, and later won concessions. For now, those hardball tactics have disappeared. As the Senate looks to pass its own health care legislation this week, those same House conservatives are taking a more measured approach — even as several conservatives in the Senate are currently balking at the bill.”

“The Koch network is working with conservative allies behind the scenes to make changes to the Senate health-care bill that was unveiled this week, declining to endorse the measure as it stands,” the Washington Post reports.

“Network officials said they still anticipate spending between $300 million to $400 million on political activity in the 2017-2018 election cycle, a target unveiled earlier this year. They said it will probably be closer to the higher end of that range.”

John Cassidy: “After Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, released a draft of the Senate health-care bill, on Thursday morning, the media finally began focussing on the essence of what Republicans are proposing: an enormous redistribution of wealth into the pockets of the already-wealthy. The bill would modify the health-insurance subsidies introduced under the Affordable Care Act and dramatically cut Medicaid, all to deliver a big tax cut to the nation’s richest households. But there’s another aspect of the legislation that has received less attention, and that’s the way it staggers its various provisions, and claims billions of dollars in savings that are far from guaranteed.”

“If McConnell’s proposal were signed into law, the tax cuts for families earning more than a quarter of a million dollars a year would take effect immediately—in fact, they would be backdated to the start of the 2017 tax year. But many of the other big provisions in the bill would only take effect down the road.”