a repeal bill so monumental in its cruelty that they feel they have no choice but to draft it in secret, not let the public know what it does, hold not a single hearing or committee markup, slip it in a brown paper package to the Congressional Budget Office, then push it through to a vote before the July 4th recess before the inevitable backlash gets too loud.
“We aren’t stupid,” one GOP Senate aide told Caitlin Owens — they know what would happen if they made their bill public.
.. Today, we learned that in a break with longstanding precedent, “Senate officials are cracking down on media access, informing reporters on Tuesday that they will no longer be allowed to film or record audio of interviews in the Senate side hallways of the Capitol without special permission.” Everyone assumes that it’s so those senators can avoid having to appear on camera being asked uncomfortable questions about a bill that is as likely to be as popular as Ebola.
.. This is how a party acts when it is ashamed of what it is about to do to the American people. Yet all it would take to stop this abomination is for three Republicans to stand up to their party’s leaders and say, “No — I won’t do this to my constituents.” With only a 52-48 majority in the Senate, that would kill the bill. But right now, it’s looking as though this Coward Caucus is going to be unable to muster the necessary courage.
.. Take Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a state where over 175,000 people have gotten insurance thanks to the Medicaid expansion... Last week The Hill reported that Capito now supports eliminating the expansion after all — just doing it over seven years instead of the three years that the House bill required...Or how about Ohio’s Rob Portman? In his state, 700,000 people gained insurance as a result of the Medicaid expansion... They’d pay for the slower elimination of the expansion by cutting money out of the existing program, so they could get rid of all of the ACA’s tax increases.. — over half of Medicaid dollars go to the elderly and disabled... That means that they aren’t just undoing the ACA; they’re making things substantially worse for tens of millions of America’s most vulnerable citizens than they were even before the ACA passed... And they’re hoping they can do all this before anyone realizes what they’re up to, making this an act of both unconscionable heartlessness and epic cowardice. Their efforts to hide what they’re doing show that they are still capable of feeling some measure of shame. But it might not be enough to stop them.
Conservatives near revolt on Senate health care negotiations
Republicans are increasingly pessimistic that key conservative senators will vote for the eventual bill.
Conservative senators and allied outside groups are on the verge of rebellion against the Senate’s Obamacare repeal effort
.. the Senate bill continues to tilt toward more moderate members of the GOP on keeping some of Obamacare’s regulatory structure and providing a more generous wind-down of the law’s Medicaid expansion. The movement has made Republicans increasingly pessimistic that two critical conservative senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, will be able to vote for the GOP’s ultimate agreement
.. it keeps “90 percent” of Obamacare, said he opposes the creation of high-risk pools favored by many Republicans, and urged Republicans to abandon attempts to save the individual marketplace with an infusion of cash.
.. “We promised the voters that we’d repeal Obamacare,” Paul said. “Instead, we want to repeal sort of a tiny bit of it and replace it with something that looks a lot like Obamacare.”
.. The outline leadership has presented isn’t Obamacare repeal, in fact it isn’t even reform. It’s a tax cut and a corporate bailout masquerading as health legislation,” said a conservative Senate aide.
.. The original plan was to pass a 2015 bill, vetoed by President Barack Obama, that would essentially have scrapped much of the law with no replacement.
.. they know an ideological reckoning is upon the party
No More Benefit of the Doubt
But we should not kid ourselves. If President Trump were to resign, the future President Pence would face just as much outrage and resistance from the left.
.. The man shoots himself in the foot on a near daily basis and, in the process, scuttles his agenda. If he is not going to listen and concurrently is going to decide he is the only voice that matters, the only expert in the room, and the only person who can defend his record in a job he admits is harder than he thought, no one should give him the benefit of the doubt any longer.
.. But the status quo of the Trump administration is going to do more long-term harm than good. He is going to enable and create a resurgent, combative Democratic Party that will undermine everything he has done and usher in impeachment hearings. He risks not just a loss of the House, but a loss of Republican seats orders of magnitude greater than the Democrats lost under Barack Obama.
.. President Trump beat Hillary Clinton, he appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and now he risks everything else.
- There will be no wall.
- There will be no Obamacare repeal.
- There will probably not even be substantive tax reform.
Republicans plan health-care vote on Thursday, capping weeks of fits and starts
Under the GOP plan, states could opt out of parts of the ACA, meaning people with preexisting conditions could be denied coverage or charged more. Such states would have to set up “high-risk pools” to absorb some of the costs
.. Some experts doubted that $8 billion was enough to aggressively address those costs over a five-year period.
.. “For subsidies to cover 68 percent of enrollees’ premium costs, as ACA tax credits do now in the individual market exchanges, the government would have to put up $32.7 billion annually,” Emily Gee, a health economist at the progressive Center for American Progress, wrote in an analysis of the plan. “Even after applying that subsidy, high-cost consumers would still owe $10,000 annually toward premiums.”