Well, Lisa Murkowski is moving in that direction. She's not enough to stop them, but this is important to note.
Remember those cost-sharing subsidies? The ones Trump cut off in order to sabotage the individual insurance markets? When an insurance company gets and adverse risk pool, they are supposed to get a subsidy to compensate them. But, the idiots who wrote the actual text of Obamacare didn't properly appropriate the money. Obama himself cut the insurance companies the checks anyway. For a while, Trump did, and then a few weeks back, he stopped because he was throwing a temper tantrum over the fact that he didn't get to "repeal Obamacare." This is sabotage. If the companies with adverse risk pools don't get those checks, they either have to pull out of the markets, raise premiums, or something like that. That's the point of Trump cutting off the subsidies.
As soon as he did it, Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray started working on a fix to Obamacare to restore the cost-sharing subsidies, to prevent Trump from engaging in this act of sabotage because... even Trump's own party recognizes that this is stupid, destructive, and likely to cause havoc which may backfire and hurt the GOP.
However, bipartisanship is verboten in the Republican Party right now, so shortly after Alexander and Murray started working on their plan, Orrin Hatch started working on a partisan plan, at which point I declared Alexander-Murray "probably dead."
And when was the last time Alexander-Murray got any oxygen?
Now, though, the GOP is trying to kill the individual mandate, which is another way to sabotage the individual markets. If the healthy people don't buy insurance, then the only ones who do will be the sick people, and if the insurance companies are required to sell to them because the GOP repeals the mandate but not the regulations, either premiums skyrocket, or the whole thing collapses because the insurance companies just won't participate. Add that to the fact that Trump cut off the cost-sharing subsidies, and you've got big(ger) trouble.
You know who recognizes this?
Lisa Murkowski.
Murkowski is now saying that she doesn't want to consider a repeal of the individual mandate without addressing the cost-sharing subsidies with something like Alexander-Murray.
A few points.
1) Murkowski is open to repealing the mandate, conditional on restoring the cost-sharing subsidies. She isn't opposed to repealing the mandate. Her position changed. Why? Maybe this is just another example of hostage-taking being successful. Trump actually shot a hostage, and it worked. Within the GOP, at least. That means the GOP might pull this off. (John Boehner called Jim Jordan a "legislative terrorist." Now, we've got Trump...)
2) Murkowski prefers Alexander-Murray to Hatch. Alexander-Murray is far less likely to pass than Hatch's plan. Why? The GOP won't stand for bipartisanship. Can Murkowski be convinced that Hatch is an acceptable substitute? If so, then this is just sturm und drang.
3) What about sequence? If McConnell, Ryan and Trump promise Murkowski that they will pass either Alexander-Murray, Hatch or something like that after the tax bill, will she vote for the tax bill? She'd be an idiot to trust them, but she might do it anyway.
4) This may be how McConnell loses Murkowski. McConnell can lose two votes. The most likely two to lose are Murkowski and Collins.
5) Dropping "skinny repeal" from the tax bill would mean they have to scale back the tax cuts. (Eliminating the mandate allows the GOP to reduce subsidy payments). This pits Murkowski and Collins against the Drama Club (Cruz, Paul, Lee and Johnson). In any normal party, Collins and Murkowski would win this fight because they are the center of the chamber. This is the Republican Party, though.
What happens now? The odds of the individual mandate being repealed just dropped a bit. However, Murkowski's vote isn't essential, and she isn't fighting very hard...