Story was edited/changed @ 9:05 pm with this new lede added: The moves were a remarkable response to the president’s repeated threats to send health insurance markets into a tailspin. I edited my original post to change it to the new headline. Here's the beginning excerpt of the new copy, still very good news:

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans moved on Tuesday to defuse President Trump’s threat to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies, maneuvering around the president toward bipartisan legislation to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the influential chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, announced that his panel would begin work in early September on legislation to “stabilize and strengthen the individual health insurance market” for 2018. He publicly urged Mr. Trump to continue making payments to health insurance companies to reimburse them for reducing the out-of-pocket medical expenses of low-income people.

In the House, two Republicans, Representatives Tom Reed of New York and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, teamed with Democrats to promote incremental health legislation that would also fund the cost-sharing subsidies.

The moves were a remarkable response to the president’s repeated threats to send health insurance markets into a tailspin. They offered tangible indications of cooperation between the parties after Republican efforts to scrap the Affordable Care Act collapsed in the Senate last week, all but ending the seven-year Republican quest to overturn President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement [....]

GOP chairman opens door to Democrats on ObamaCare

[....] Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who helms the Senate Health Committee, announced he will hold bipartisan hearings during the first week of September on strengthening ObamaCare’s individual markets for 2018. The goal: to craft a bipartisan, short-term proposal by mid-September. [....]

 

The hearings will give Democrats — particularly Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the committee’s ranking member — a seat at the negotiating table on healthcare for the first time, opening up a process that, to this point, has been tightly controlled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [....]

 

“We need to put out the fire in these collapsing markets wherever these markets are,” Alexander said at the beginning of a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on nominations.

Time is of the essence.

Insurers must sign contracts with the federal government at the end of September saying they’ll sell plans on the exchanges [....]