In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appointed a group of 13 Republican Senators to prepare a bill. Democrats, independents, and other Republicans were excluded from the process and given no information until the new bill was released on June 22, 2017. The Senate bill is called the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017. The bill's differences from the House bill reflected divergent opinions within the Republican caucus. The phase-out of the Medicaid expansion would be made more gradual, but funding for Medicaid as it stood before the ACA would be reduced. Eligibility for premium subsidies would be tightened for middle-class recipients, but some aid would be extended to enrollees below the poverty level in states that did not expand Medicaid.
