Andy Slavitt/USA Today with a ‘what if it were bipartisan’:
Support for the Graham-Cassidy bill — including from Republicans — was weak and getting weaker as more details spilled out and more last-minute changes were made. So far, seven Republican governors have spoken out against the bill and many Republican Medicaid directors signed a letter condemning it further.
In fact, the further away from Washington you get and the closer to patient care, the worse the bill looks. It’s been pilloried by groups that represent patients, physicians, hospitals and insurers. They say it will "undermine safeguards,” “millions of patients will lose their coverage,” and it will make coverage “more expensive." Equally damning, they label the bill “not workable.” And for all these flaws, it’s the highly partisan approach that would do in the bill and its sponsors.
From a free market Republican, Andrew Cline/USA Today, earlier this month:
On health care, Democrats have two advantages over Republicans. One is a shared purpose: universal coverage achieved through aggressive government intervention. The other is their willingness to achieve that goal incrementally.
Catherine Rampell/WaPo:
‘Reasonable’ Republicans are betraying us, too
For years we’ve been told that the original sin of the Affordable Care Act was that it was procedurally flawed. It was passed in the dead of night, constructed in smoke-filled backrooms and only passed thanks to partisan budget gimmicks.
These critiques were mostly nonsense, of course.
Obamacare went through a painfully slow, year-long process. It was considered at lots and lots of hearings. It received multiple assessments from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and attracted a supermajority of Senate votes.
Contrary to popular misconception, the bill was not even passed using the budget reconciliation process.
All of these attacks may not be true of Obamacare’s passage — but they do apply to Republicans’ attempts to repeal it.
Watch this:
Russell Berman/Atlantic:
A Primetime Clash Over Health Care
Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy sparred with Bernie Sanders and Amy Kobluchar on CNN hours after their bill dismantling Obamacare appeared to collapse.
It was Sanders, however, who took full advantage of the national audience to articulate a position on health-care that was more nuanced than his critics—both Democrats and Republicans—often attribute to him. Some Democrats had feared the Vermont independent would allow Graham to goad him into a debate over single-payer when the party needed him to focus on defeating the Republican repeal bill.
But Sanders appeared more agile than he did during some of his presidential primary debates with Hillary Clinton last year. He assailed the Graham-Cassidy while defending the strengths of Obamacare and talking up consensus Democratic proposals, including a gradual expansion of Medicare, a public insurance option, and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. …
Graham's comments fit a theme for the 90-minute debate: As the Democrats tried to entice the Republicans with talk of negotiations and consensus, the Republicans recoiled toward repeal. Graham and Cassidy may reluctantly recognize their own plan is dead, but with the defeat still fresh, they weren’t ready to move on yet, either.
I never bought into the idea the Bernie’s bill was bad politics or bad timing. Introducing it now got attention. It made this a respectable topic. It didn’t stop us from protesting Graham-Cassidy. Hey, it’s really a lousy bill and won’t come up for a vote, but so what? Democrats now have a publicly discussed marker and time to work on it, flesh it out, make it work and, if necessary, abandon it. That’s how policy happens. Incrementalism ain’t pretty and it takes time, but it’s the only way this will happen.
Michelle Goldberg/NY Times:
Conservatives are often unmoved by complaints that our system is undemocratic, arguing that America was intended not as a democracy but a republic. But if this was true at the founding, it’s probably not how most Americans understand their country today, when “undemocratic” is considered a political epithet.
Before Trump, there was enough overlap between popular will and electoral outcome to make the issue largely semantic. Now it’s existential. Certainly, we need checks on the tyranny of the majority. But what we have now is the tyranny of the minority.
Matthew Walther/The Week:
Don't forget about Flint
If you want to understand what some of us mean when we say that Washington, D.C., doesn't care about the post-industrial America of poverty, drug abuse, and spiritual despair, what even President Trump means when he talks about "American carnage," get off exit 7 on I-475 in Michigan and head down Court Street until you get to the Flint Children's Museum on the campus of Kettering University.
In many ways, the museum — with its cheerful twin yellow towers popping out from either side of the large brick structure in a kind of invitation to exuberance — resembles many other institutions of its kind. Just about every medium-sized city has a place like this. There are colorful hands-on exhibits on circuits, bridge-building, and gravity; a pretend post office and grocery store; a climbing wall; a "Tot Spot" with rubber tumbling mats and age-appropriate toys.
But there is one thing that isn't quite right. Even for a public building in a city whose population has been declining steadily since 1970, the place will seem unusually quiet. Another thing you will notice almost immediately is that the drinking fountains are all turned off or torn up and covered with signs.
Patrick Redford/Deadspin after Trump retweeted a Pat Tillman meme:
Stop Using Pat Tillman
So, remember Tillman as a brave man. Remember him as an athlete who gave up on a lucrative profession to make a sacrifice others would not. But to remember him this way without taking into account everything that happened after he went to the Middle East would be disingenuous. Don’t forget how he developed anti-war views, or how his legacy was manipulated by the powerful in order to stay in power and to keep feeding young men’s lives to the war machine. To bring Tillman into the national anthem kneeling debate as someone who would have reprimanded his teammates for protesting racial injustice (and not, as cynical commentators would have you think, the military) is to completely misunderstand who he was or what he believed in. Pat Tillman was exploited as propaganda from the moment he enlisted, and even more so after his death. Don’t let him be used today.
Pundits like to tell us what to do and not to do. So here’s my contribution: don’t forget Puerto Rico.