(Bloomberg) -- Republicans in Congress were reeling Tuesday fromthe failure of their latest health bill as President Donald Trumpsaid he’s willing to let Obamacare fail and called on the Senate tochange one of its central rules.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the chamber willvote on a straight repeal -- with a two-year delay -- a plan thatlikely faces even steeper hurdles than his replacement bill.

Trump said on Twitter that the Senate, controlled by Republicans52-48, should eliminate the 60-vote threshold for advancing billsthat don’t use a special fast-track procedure.

"Even parts of full Repeal need 60. 8 Dems control Senate.Crazy!" the president said on Twitter. Trump also said he waswilling to “let Obamacare fail” before moving forward on areplacement.

House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters he would like to see "theSenate move on something." The House passed its own version of areplacement bill in May.

"I’m worried that Obamacare will continue to stand and the lawwill continue to collapse and hurt people in the process," saidRyan of Wisconsin.

The inability to deliver on seven years of GOP promises torepeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would be the biggestfailure yet for Trump and Republicans since they won control ofCongress and the White House.

McConnell’s move came after two more Republican senatorsannounced their opposition to the Republican leader’s plan, whichhe drafted largely in secret. The defections by Mike Lee of Utahand Jerry Moran of Kansas, in addition to previous opposition byGOP Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine, wereenough to sink the measure.

Lee and Moran said in statements they wouldn’t supportMcConnell’s bill because it didn’t go far enough to address therising cost of health care.

“We should not put our stamp of approval on bad policy,” Moransaid in a statement on Twitter. He criticized the way thehealth-care bill was written through a “closed-door process” andsaid the Senate must “start fresh” with open hearings anddebate.

Lee said the latest version didn’t repeal Obamacare taxes andregulations or lower premiums.

Republicans are expected to discuss how to pick up the pieces onTuesday, when they gather for their regular policy lunch, which isoften attended by Vice President Mike Pence.

Several senators have made clear that they want GOP leaders topursue an alternative that would require working withDemocrats.

Others embraced the repeal-first strategy.

“I think that’s a prudent step,” Senator Tom Cotton, an ArkansasRepublican, said on Newsradio 102.9 in Little Rock. Even ifthat fails, he said, lawmakers need to keep working on the issue ofhealth care. “It’s too important to too many Arkansans to simplywalk away from it.”

Stunning blow

The defections of Moran and Lee, two Tea Party-backed senators,is a stunning blow to McConnell and Trump, who campaigned on apromise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which the presidentrepeatedly called a disaster.

“Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & workon a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Demswill join in!” Trump said on Twitter on Monday night.

That won’t be easy. While Congress last year passed a repealbill, they did so knowing it would be vetoed by President BarackObama. This year, now that it could become law, such a proposal hasdrawn little support among Republican senators, with the exceptionof those in its most conservative wing.

Such a defeat may be part of a plan by a Republican leadershipteam that has expressed a desire to begin moving on to othermatters, including an overhaul of the tax code, a boost in thenation’s debt ceiling and next year’s spending bills.

No clear path

On the health bill, McConnell was left facing an increasinglynarrow path, with no apparent way to win over conservative andmoderate holdouts seeking to pull the bill in oppositedirections.

A sizable group of Republicans from Medicaid expansion stateshad yet to commit to the bill either, and Lee’s push for a broaderrepeal of Obamacare’s insurance regulations risked pushing away thevotes of senators like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bill Cassidy ofLouisiana, who have been among the most vocal in pushing tocontinue providing protections for people with pre-existingconditions.

A straight repeal bill could look even worse for them. TheCongressional Budget Office in January said repealing the Medicaidexpansion and exchange subsidies while keeping other Obamacareregulations intact would cause many insurance markets toimplode. That would result in an additional 32 million uninsuredand premiums roughly doubling, with 75 percent of the countrylacking insurers entirely in the individual market in a decade.

Some Republicans said they were ready to redouble their effortsto repeal Obamacare.

“We can because we must. This is kind of a no-fail moment,”Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, said Tuesday on FoxNews. “Let’s get all the people that disagree in one room and let’shammer this all out.”

House Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan of Ohio told CNN Tuesdaythat he supported voting on a straight repeal of Obamacare anddismissed the idea that such a bill lacked enough votes.

“If you just went with the conventional wisdom, the underdogwould never win,” he said. “So let’s actually put it out there andsee what happens when the roll call is really called.”

Democrats immediately blasted the idea. Democratic Senator ChrisMurphy of Connecticut called it “a humanitarian disaster ofincomprehensible scale.” Writing on Twitter, he said, “Full repealwith no replacement will cause markets to fail. No insurer willstay in an exchange that is disappearing in 24 months.”

Other GOP senators have been talking about a new approach tohealth legislation, with Lindsey Graham of South Carolina tweetingagain Monday about his latest proposal with Cassidy to keep most ofthe Affordable Care Act’s taxes in place but give states far morefreedom on what to do with the money.

McConnell’s plan already was teetering on the brink afterSenator John McCain’s unexpected surgery late Friday left him oneshort of the votes needed to start debate this week. The majorityleader had said the bill wouldn’t be considered until McCainreturned.

McCain, in Arizona to recover from the operation, issued astatement saying the GOP shouldn’t repeat Democrats’ strategy ofpassing Obamacare without any votes from the other party.

Congress must "hold hearings, receive input from members of bothparties, and heed the recommendations of our nation’s governors" topass a health-care plan, McCain said.

House conservatives Monday immediately renewed calls for bothchambers to enact a straight repeal of Obamacare, and leave thereplacement debate for later.

‘Full repeal bill’

“Expect growing calls from conservatives for Congress to take upfull repeal bill that passed under Obama,” Alyssa Farah, aspokeswoman for the conservative House Freedom Caucus, wrote onTwitter.

Lee’s and Moran’s statements came shortly after Trump metprivately to discuss strategy with a small group of Republicansenators, including other members of McConnell’s leadership team.Trump said in a July 12 interview with the Christian BroadcastingNetwork’s Pat Robertson that if the measure didn’t pass the Senate,“It would be very bad. I will be very angry about it and a lot ofpeople will be very upset.”

McConnell spoke of the potential of moving to a scaled-back,bipartisan version of health legislation last month when an earlierversion of his GOP-only bill collapsed because it lacked enoughsupport.

He told a Rotary Club in Glasgow, Kentucky, that if Republicanscan’t “agree on an adequate replacement, then some kind of actionwith regard to the private health insurance market must occur.”

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