Today the Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing on the Graham-Cassidy health care "reform" bill -- and that will be the only hearing the bill will get. That is a piddling improvement on the Senate's health care "reform" bill of July, which received, shall we say, fewer than one hearing in the Senate, but the relative lack of transparency remains a sign that Republicans know the Graham-Cassidy bill is trash and are trying to ram it through before everyone in the world knows it's trash. Problem with that plan is that everyone in the world already knows it's trash -- virtually every organization that has opined about the bill, from the AARP to the ACLU to the American Heart Association to the American Hospital Association to the American Nurses Association to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association to the governor of Alaska -- and this is a very abridged list I've presented, mostly confined to the letter A! -- has come out against the bill.
And for good reason: the Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) won't have time to do a full score on the bill before the Senate's Wednesday vote (though they'll release a preliminary report early this week), but, again, virtually everyone who's studied Graham-Cassidy has found that it will do a significant amount of damage to a significant number of Americans. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that 35 states, plus the District of Columbia, would lose Medicaid funding, and our very own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid find that nearly half of America's states would lose at least 20% of their Medicaid funding under Graham-Cassidy, while a couple of very, very red states would actually see an increase in funding (which doesn't look at all like a reward to those states for electing Republicans or rejecting the Obamacare Medicaid expansion). And of course the Commonwealth Fund has found that Graham-Cassidy would toss 32 million good Americans off their health insurance in 10 years, with 15 to 18 million of that number losing their health insurance in the first year.
With great PR like that, it's no wonder Republicans like Sen. Grassley have such trouble defending the bill on the merits, telling us instead that it's important for Republicans to "keep their promise to repeal Obamacare." Of course, if you think politicians should keep their actual promise to represent the will of their constituents, you won't be very impressed by that reasoning. But at least a few other Republicans in the Senate aren't impressed by it, either -- Sen. McCain has already said he'll vote against it (even though his BFF Lindsey Graham is one of the co-sponsors!), citing mainly the shoddy process by which the Senate has moved the bill forward, and Sen. Collins of Maine, who voted against the last repeal effort, has said she's leaning against this one, too. That leaves the other Senator who scuttled the July effort, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Senate Republicans have reportedly been trying to get her support by essentially excluding Alaska and Hawaii from most of the bill's evils. If she's contemplating taking the bait, she should remember the saga of Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, once literally the most popular Senator in America, but an utter pariah after his attempt to use the Obamacare bill to get some goodies for his home state. (She might also remember that the one time they primaried her out, she ran as a write-in and still won re-election.)
But all that is a hell of a thing to depend upon. You can ignore declarations of opposition from Sens. Paul and Cruz, because they're the kind of fellows who let the perfect evil murder the good evil, and Dean Heller's co-sponsored the damn thing for Frick's sake, and no one's even talking to Shelly Moore Capito after she made all that noise and then voted for the skinny repeal bill anyway. So you know what you have to do: use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone) and tell your Senators, in no uncertain terms, to reject the destructive Graham-Cassidy health care bill. They're on a deadline, of course -- since they're trying to pass this thing as a budget resolution, in order to avoid a Democratic filibuster, Senate rules demand that they pass it by Saturday, September 30; after Saturday, they'll have to start all over again, which I imagine they won't have the stomach to do right away, with President Trump breathing down their necks about tax "reform." That doesn't mean they won't succeed -- certainly they'll try. But we can't thwart their nefarious efforts unless we make our will known, in numbers they can't ignore. So let's get to it.
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