IS THE MEDICAID EXPANSION ON THE WAY TO TOTAL EXTINCTION?

…This is the man in charge of the Senate Republican’s total hypocrisy.

 

Under the new Republican health care bill, Americans will still be thrown off Medicaid….only more slowly.

 

I would like for you to read the following and guess as to who said it, and when was it said?

 

“Fast-tracking a major legislative overhaul such as health care reform or a new national energy tax without the benefit of a full and transparent debate, this does a disservice to the American people.”

 

 

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it?  Well, to answer the question as to who said it.  Would you believe that this was a statement made against the Democrats by the now current Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, back in 2009.

 

Oh, and McConnell also added to this statement, “Democrats using such means would make it absolutely clear they intend to carry out their plans on a purely partisan basis.”

 

Compared to what the Senate leader is doing with the current Senate health care bill, the Republican hypocrisy is now so rampant that what McConnell accused the Democrats of in 2009 would today be called “child’s play”.

 

Today, the GOP keeps trying to say: “Well, everybody does it!”, but today, this issue is totally owned by the Republican Senators.

 

Whether you agreed with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or not, you would have to admit that back then, it was debated for more than a year and it went through an elaborate hearing and amendment process that included some changes by Republicans.

 

But today, regarding the stated proposed ACA replacement program, the Senate leader is trying to use methods that are completely at odds with how the law was originally brought to life in the early Obama administration.

 

The bill that the Senate Republicans are writing is being held as close to the vest as one would be expected to hold the president's nuclear codes.  In addition, President Trump and his administration including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who keeps providing McConnell excellent cover as their assorted outrages dominate the news, while they deflect attention from Capitol Hill.

 

The wrecking squad works in the shadows knowing that if the public were given time to absorb the health care damage in store for millions of Americans, the pushback would be gigantic.  The Senate Republicans say their bill will be better than the one that Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) pushed through the House.  You know, the one that Trump had recently described the House measure as “mean” during a meeting with the Republican senators.

 

As the Post writer, E.J. Dionne wrote about the new bill: “Well, yes, a Category 4 hurricane is a bit less harrowing than a Category 5. But most of us would prefer to avoid both.”

 

As close as they are trying to keep the bill from being reviewed, which BTW: they are hoping to pass through Reconciliation, which means that it could pass with only Republican senate votes plus the GOP vice president.  But it does seem that one of the so-called improvements has leaked out.

 

According to the leak, people will still be thrown off Medicaid, but more slowly under the new Senate bill than under the House bill.  But they will still be thrown off.  To pay for this slowing, the Senate would reportedly make additional cuts to Medicaid in other areas. Plus, to finance all their tax cuts for the super-rich, Republicans will also gut other insurance for more Americans, one way or another.

 

It is now obvious why McConnell is trying to keep the pressure off the many Republican senators who had previously pledged to protect Medicaid and other aspects of the ACA that benefit their constituents.

 

The US Senators I am referring to include: Dean Heller of Nevada and Jeff Flake of Arizona.  Both of these Republican senators are up for reelection next year, as well as Rob Portman of Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.  Susan Collins of Maine has stood honorably as one of her party’s firmest skeptics of this fiasco-bill-in-the-making, but even she seems to be wobbling.

 

It’s all in the numbers.  Because the Dems have 48 senate votes, it would only take 3 Republicans that have pledged to protect Medicaid to oppose the new Republican health care bill.  This why the Republican senate bill has not been made public.

 

The Republican hypocrisy says that they are not showing Americans the bill because of the damage it would bring to them, once we all understood how many millions of Americans would be sorely affected by the bill.

 

In fact, the exact number of those that would be affected is unknowable because the bill’s architects won’t even admit to what they’re doing.

 

The problem is timing.  Action to stop this has less time for saving these parts of the Affordable Care Act than one might think.  The Democratic senators must take every opportunity for forcing this issue to the top of the pile. 

 

Jacob Leibenluft, a former Obama administration official, has described the problem in a recent interview: “If you don’t have hearings, and you don’t have big moments for television, you don’t have bandwidth for coverage.” Leibenluft, is now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, he says individual reporters on the health-care beat are doing good work, but their stories are getting limited attention.

 

As a case in point, Leibenluft has spoken just before the terrible Wednesday shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and four others at the GOP softball practice, which properly commanded the nation’s attention.  But his point was about the placing of the health care issue in the normal flow of political news.

 

Leibenluft put it so succinctly when he stated: “I hate to think that looking back on this period, we’ll realize that the most regressive piece of social legislation in modern American history was passed, and no one was paying attention.”

 

We all know that the Trump/Russia/Conflict of Interest/Mike Flynn/Twitter, stories will all still be there for months.  Unfortunately, we cannot say the same about the issue of health care that millions of Americans count on.

 

By then, the Medicaid issues may be on the road to total extinction.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017