The Senate’s sickness
Enough already. Just stop. The Senate needs to call it quits on ever more pathetic attempts to slay the beast they call Obamacare, for the love of the 22 million or more Americans doomed to end up without coverage and insurance markets now dizzied with uncertainty.
It’s literally what the doctor ordered: On Friday, the American Medical Association pleaded with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to instead work toward a bipartisan effort to strengthen the ailing insurance business.
Schumer’s game. But McConnell, under bidding of President Trump, grasps zombie-like for a bill, any bill, that he can put to his members in coming days in order to declare victory following two failed tries to shove a replacement bill through a Senate short of majority support.
A replacement bill would, even in its second, supposedly kinder iteration, roll back Medicaid expansion that has enabled workers with low wages to afford decent coverage, and slash subsidies that make health insurance affordable for the working class.
A cap on Medicaid, which has covered the poor for decades, would gut the program’s power to grow with the population.
All this enables tax cuts for the wealthy, scaled back from earlier version of the bill but still significant — and far fewer insured than before in the estimation of the Congressional Budget Office. And all for naught. Some Republican senators (like Rand Paul of Kentucky) said nothing short of Obamacare repeal will suffice. Others (like Susan Collins of Maine) deem the cuts, especially to Medicaid, too cruel and destabilizing. One, John McCain, battles brain cancer, his date of return uncertain.
Meanwhile, and hopefully fatally, the Senate parliamentarian has now ruled vast swaths of the bill will need 60 votes to pass.
So desperate is McConnell to get even the 50 votes needed to debate that he’s wheeling and dealing amendments and funds. To a bill cooked up in a secret working group, he now adds the high-pressure sales tactic of a lightning round.
Failing that, another gambit would yank away Obama’s Affordable Care Act, phased out over two years — a repeal that the Congressional Budget Office projects would leave (gulp) 32 million fewer insured. Even if the Senate swallows this deadly pill, the House, having already passed an Obamacare replacement package Trump now decries as “mean,” would then have to take a repeal vote with no replacement plan on the horizon.
An embarrassment wrapped in cruelty wrapped in political disaster.