Campaign Action
Because there's no way to over-emphasize the point, here's yet another reminder that the Senate "healthcare" bill is terrible by every measure other than as a tax cut for the rich. It doesn't do anything to "fix" health care, and everything it does do makes America's healthcare problems much worse.
The Senate’s Obamacare repeal bill would drive up the uninsured rate across all demographics, CBO estimates, but hit low-income Americans the hardest. That could leave almost 30 percent of low-income individuals aged 50-64 without coverage by 2026, with close to 40 percent of low income individuals between 30 and 49 years old going uninsured.
It's a reversal of the Affordable Care Act that neatly rockets the number of uninsured Americans back up to the levels that were considered a crisis in the years before the law took effect. And that's not even taking into account the millions of Americans who will get worse health insurance because the Senate is gutting the rules saying what that insurance must cover.
The cuts to Medicaid, meanwhile, are simply a straight-up effort to throw people off the program while blaming the individual states for doing the dirty work.
The legislation would phase out enhanced funding for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and end the whole program’s entitlement status by imposing new limits on federal funding. Those changes amount to an estimated $772 billion cut to the program over a decade, CBO projected, and force states to take on a greater share of the financial responsibility. As a result, the nonpartisan scorekeeping office projected that some states would need to cut Medicaid benefits and restrict the program’s eligibility.
Senate and House Republicans know full well that cutting three quarters of a trillion dollars from Medicaid, a service targeted toward the neediest of Americans, will kick elderly Americans out of nursing homes, will kick low-income children off of health insurance, and will otherwise harm millions of people. That's exactly why they're cutting that money while simultaneously tossing the responsibility to individual states to clean up the mess. They know the states will have to respond by throwing people off the program—it's not theoretical, there's simply no possible way to cut three quarters of a trillion dollars from the program without denying care—but national Republicans want to be able to wash their own hands of those repercussions. So they'll say it was the states making those mean, nasty decisions—not them.
There's really no possible reason for Republicans to even want this bill except as a tax cut. That's all it provides. Their constituents will suffer, their states will suffer, Americans booted off their health insurance will die preventable deaths, and the whole sodding thing is simply an exercise in drowning the federal government in the bathtub as anti-government groups have demanded for so very long now.
That fifty or so senators are negotiating over what perks they might be able to squeeze out of McConnell for selling their own voters out ought to be remarkable. It's not, but it ought to be.