Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Sept. 6 clarified via a statement that he had not changed his mind about insisting that any effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, must involve convening hearings, holding open debates and allowing amendments from Republicans and Democrats.

Earlier in the day McCain had made remarks to a reporter from The Hill in which he expressed support for an ACA repeal-and-replace proposal from his Republican colleagues Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The bill has been gaining steam on Capitol Hill, although a final version has yet to be revealed.

McCain was one of three Republicans — joining Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — who voted against the so-called "skinny bill," or the Health Care Freedom Act, on July 28, dealing the final blow to his party leaders' weeklong effort to dismantle the ACA.

Two other Republican bills, the Better Care Reconciliation Act and the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act, had failed to pass the Senate earlier that week.

Tangled words

According to The Hill, McCain said on Sept. 6 that he supported the Graham-Cassidy bill and would vote for it.

But the article also reported that McCain said it would be a mistake if the bill did not go through regular order. McCain said, however, that that "doesn't mean I wouldn't vote for it."

The article reported that McCain thought the Graham-Cassidy legislation had a chance of passing before the Sept. 30 expiration of the fiscal year 2017 budget reconciliation process for passing an ACA repeal bill using a 51-vote simple majority.

McCain also said his home state's governor supported the bill and he thought other governors also liked the measure, according to the report.

In a tweet, a Politico reporter said McCain said he would support the Graham-Cassidy measure "without hearings but that it wouldn't be right."

Speculation grew throughout the afternoon on whether McCain was backtracking from remarks he made on the Senate floor on July 25 and in an Aug. 31 op-ed in The Washington Post, in which he demanded a return to Congress' tradition of handling legislation through the regular order of hearings, debate and bipartisan amendments.

"Urgent: We are in for a battle," tweeted Andy Slavitt, the former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration's final years.

"McCain reinterprets McCain's floor speech," Slavitt added in another tweet.

"Alert: McCain has flipped on ACA repeal. All hands on deck. We need to pummel them for the next 24 days," tweeted Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy and a senior fellow in economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

But McCain set the record straight.

"While I support the concept of the Graham-Cassidy proposal, I want to see the final legislation and understand its impact on the state of Arizona before taking a position," he said his statement. "As I have said all along, any effort to replace Obamacare must be done through the regular order of committee hearings, open debate and amendments from both sides of the aisle."

What's in the bill

In a Sept. 6 op-ed in USA Today, Slavitt said that an earlier version of the Graham-Cassidy bill, which was co-sponsored by Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., "looks like the same repeal-and-replace plans Americans soundly rejected in poll after poll," pointing to surveys from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Quinnipiac University.

He said that the draft bill would end the ACA's expansion of Medicaid to people slightly above the poverty line and tax credits for Americans buying coverage in the individual market — replacing both with a capped block grant "that would gradually shrink until it disappeared altogether."

"The plan also makes deep cuts to Medicaid, weakens federal protections for people with preexisting conditions, and introduces Medicaid caps which limit the spending on low-income kids, seniors and people with disabilities," Slavitt said.

But Graham and Cassidy said their proposal would return power to states to "craft solutions specific to the needs of their citizens."

"Each state would receive a set level of federal assistance based on the size of its eligible population, cost of care and other factors," the two lawmakers said in a July 21 statement. "If a state's eligible population grew, the amount it received would likewise increase."

Under their plan, the ACA's individual mandate requiring certain eligible Americans to buy healthcare insurance or pay a tax penalty would be repealed.