The Senate is debating at least four pieces of legislation. Concessions to the right will make it harder to gain votes in the center, while concessions to the center will make it harder to gain votes on the right. While action continues, it’s nothing more than a death rattle. Nobody quite wants to admit that the repeal drive is dead, and every Republican would sort of prefer to make some other Republican take responsibility for it, but fundamentally the bill is dead.
Don’t believe it. [snip]
The real fate of American health care lies with five Republicans — Dean Heller (R-NV), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Rob Portman (R-OH), John Hoeven (R-ND), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — whose behavior since McConnell rolled out BCRA 2.0 has been strange.
These five all clearly and unambiguously stated that the Medicaid cuts in BCRA 1.0 were too severe. But then McConnell went back to the drawing board and came up with a new piece of legislation that made no changes whatsoever to the Medicaid provision. At that point, you would expect everyone who called the Medicaid provision a deal killer to say no to the new bill. And that is, in fact, what Collins did. But the other five all laid low.
Once the bill was dead due to objections from the right, the moderates came out of the woodwork and announced their opposition. But the pattern we saw in the House was that once the Freedom Caucus was fully on board with the leadership’s plans, moderates lacked the backbone to actually kill the bill.
The Senate moderates have the power, right now, to band together and kill the bill by fundamentally rejecting the idea of massive insurance coverage losses. They could cross the aisle and work with Democrats on fixes to stabilize the exchanges. But they keep rather pointedly not doing that.Maybe it's because they're not "moderates." It's hard not to smell a rat -- 5 rats, in fact. Remember how TrumpCare 1.0 was dead in the House... until it revived and passed?
The Senate TrumpCare bill has been scored by the Congressional Budget Office; it will result in 15 million people losing their health insurance in the first year, and 22 million by 2026. And still, these so- called "moderate" Senate Republicans want to cower in the shadows, hoping they won't be called upon to take a courageous, moral stand.
See those names and states bolded above? If any of them represent you, whether or not you've contacted their office in the past, please contact them and let them know there's no amount of lipstick that will make this pig of a bill look good. Once again, here's your TrumpCare tool kit.
