Republicans rush to destroy healthcare with 'cruel' bill that smashes both ACA and Medicaid

By Mark Sumner  

Tuesday Sep 19, 2017 · 5:53 AM PDT

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Donald Trump and the Republicans are so fixated on blowing up everything that Barack Obama touched, that they don’t give any thought to how many people are caught in the explosion. While it may have seemed that their efforts to annihilate the American health care system with a poorly-constructed, hastily assembled, fundamentally awful bill ended in failure back in August, they’re back. And they’ve doubled down on a bill that would:

• Give states the option of ending protection on pre-existing conditions
• Allow insurance companies to raise rates when someone becomes ill
• Implement a formula that robs blue states to fund red states

That last point makes the bill especially attractive to some Republican Senators. Even though the bill would hurt people in their owns states, it would hurt people in California and New York so much worse. In fact, the bill is specifically designed to attack the states that have done the most to help their own citizens. The more programs and assistance a state has implemented, the more it’s punished. The more slothful, stingy, and insensitive a state has been, the greater its reward. That’s an idea Republicans can sell.

As the New York Times puts it …

It is hard to overstate the cruelty of the Graham-Cassidy bill. It would eliminate the mandate that even healthy people buy health insurance, end the subsidies that help people purchase coverage and stop the expansion of Medicaid. It would offer states block grants they could use to help people get insurance but would leave people at the mercy of individual state legislatures and, over all, would provide $239 billion less than what the federal government would spend under current law between 2020 and 2026, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

This is a not just a threat to the ACA, not just an end to Medicaid. It’s a bill expressly designed to harm people for the crime of living in blue states. And it’s very, very close to passing. 

URGENT: There’s a new Obamacare repeal bill in the Senate. (Yes, AGAIN.) Call your Senators at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to save our healthcare.

Of course, Republicans didn’t restrict their attacks to only blue states. Among those states most harmed by Graham–Cassidy are Alaska, Maine, and Arizona. States that, by a total coincidence, are home to Republican senators who voted against the last attempt to thoughtlessly disrupt one sixth of the economy and the lives of millions of Americans.

That doesn’t mean that Graham–Cassidy is going to be voted down by the same crew. It could just as easily mean that one or more of those Republican senators acts on the lesson of “independent thought will be punished” and joins the rest of the collective in the “yes” column. After all, the whole purpose of this bill is to divide up the money the federal government doles out for health care into block grants given to each state, and it’s already been demonstrated that the formula used to determine the cut that each state gets can easily be tweeked to make it much larger, or punishingly small.

Republicans are literally playing with numbers to kill Americans in the states that dont’ go their way. Death panels turn out to be real after all.

This bill is not only destructive to healthcare, the way Republicans are pushing it through the Senate represents the end of that chamber as a debating body. Under the pretense that holding public hearings would just allow Democrats to bring up issues — which Republicans won’t tolerate — Mitch McConnell has clamped down on the process in a way that hasn’t been seen in over a century.

And that’s just the start. The way in which McConnell intends to push the bill through, allowing no debate, no amendments, no objections, has never been done. It’s an absolutely unprecedented expression of single-party rule.