BY THE NUMBERS: Four Senate Republicans Say They Can’t Support Health Care Bill Yet.

The four conservative GOP senators — Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Ted Cruz of Texas — released a joint statement Thursday afternoon outlining their concerns:

“Currently, for a variety of reasons, we are not ready to vote for this bill, but we are open to negotiation and obtaining more information before it is brought to the floor. There are provisions in this draft that represent an improvement to our current healthcare system but it does not appear this draft as written will accomplish the most important promise that we made to Americans: to repeal Obamacare and lower their healthcare costs.”

“It looks like a reiteration or a keeping of Obamacare,” Sen. Paul told reporters Thursday afternoon. “I’m a ‘no’ on the bill currently.”

Paul said the group came out together because they’d have more negotiating power to move the bill in a more conservative direction.

Their displeasure includes the amount of subsidies given to people to purchase insurance, the Medicaid expansion continues for another three years and the $15 billion per year to prop up the insurance companies providing insurance in the individual Obamacare market for the next three years.

There may be some kabuki going on here, much like Nancy Pelosi’s mock drama the day her House passed ObamaCare — she’s too sharp an operator to have held the vote if she didn’t already have the votes.

McConnell’s bill still has a few missing items, such as cross-state purchasing, any one of which might be enough to bring Johnson and Lee on board. My gut feeling is that Paul and Cruz will remain holdouts, but McConnell only needs two more votes plus Mike Pence to pass the thing.

But then there’s this from the NYT: McConnell’s Calculation May Be That He Still Wins by Losing.

In his 2016 memoir, “The Long Game,” he noted that, as minority leader, he went out of his way to make sure that one party owned the health care issue. “I wanted a clear line of demarcation — they were for this, and we were against it,” he said. Perhaps he is not excited to let that one party now be his own.

We should have an answer in the next week.