Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finally ended his health care fan dance on Thursday, revealing the naked truth that everyone had suspected was underneath all the posturing and secrecy: It's a bunch of tax cuts for wealthy people, to be paid for by forcing the less well-off to pay more for health insurance and/or neglect their health.
Republicans see the bill as keeping a promise to voters, since they'd promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare) since the moment that it passed. They figure, too, that Americans will remember the headlines about their victory at the polling stations in 2018 and 2020 – before anything much actually happens, if the Senate bill's schedule for repeal prevails – and they won't remember to point to 2017-era Republicans as the problem in 2025 when Medicaid reductions start to get truly dramatic
For all the talk that President Donald Trump doesn't want the bill to be too "mean," it's possible that McConnell and his fellow Republicans are simply applying the lessons of both the term "Obamacare" and Trump's own elevation to the highest office in the land: Branding is more important than policy to many voters (and particularly Trump's voters).
The Republican brand is repealing Obamacare, and they'll do it come hell or high water or masses of sick and dying low-income Americans sitting in dingy emergency room waiting areas for doctor's visits they'll eventually go bankrupt for making. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is really more of a Democratic thing, anyway.
Whether the bill can actually pass the Senate, and whether, if it does, the Senate and the House can come to a conference report acceptable to factions in both houses is, of course, still up in the air: McConnell can only afford two defections before his revealed ugliness collapses under its own weight, and there's plenty there to weigh upon the hearts and minds of senators who either like their jobs or care for their constituents more than ideology demands.
But if it passes and Trump can be convinced that it is sufficiently un-mean to sign, tens of millions of Americans are expected to have to go without insurance after the bill takes effect. Millions more will probably see their benefits curtailed, whether through cuts to Medicaid or waivers that allow states to remove insurance requirements from plans available to residents. Most people will have to pay more if they do purchase insurance.
The only provision in the entire bill that would have a net benefit for a non-wealthy person is the repeal of the tanning tax: Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that the people who use tanning salons are white women in the Midwest and the South, especially those with household incomes above 200 percent of the poverty line (which is currently $12,000). One could even call them Trump voters.
And without access to health insurance, or health insurance that covers actual health care, America will return to a place where we can be whipped into a frenzy of fear at the idea that single-payer health care will result in potential rationing of medical services, while Republican policies, as embodied by the House and Senate Obamacare repeal bills, will inevitably create a situation in which we ration our own health care because we can't afford to do otherwise.
We fear that universal health care will mean waiting too long for an MRI, but Republicans will celebrate the passage of a bill that will mean millions of Americans can't afford an MRI at all, and call it "liberty."
-Megan Carpentier
My take: Before you read my take read again those last two paragraphs above. Now the cold hard fact: 4 Republicans are holding out on the Senate healthcare bill and they are holding out for more callousness not less. They are not the moderates. This "holdout" is of course a ruse to, if anything, create leverage for cutting more out of the healthcare bill. These Senators will vote for the bill. The bill will pass the Senate and go back to the House. Understand no Republican congressman will refuse to "repeal" Obamacare. The only question now is to what island or planet we send these "representatives of all the people".
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