USA TODAY International Edition
Last-ditch Obamacare repeal is bad medicine for America
Given up as a lost cause this summer, the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare is back, this time in the form of a last-ditch effort led by GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy, Dean Heller and Ron Johnson.
Like previous efforts, this measure would strip tens of millions of people of their health coverage. It would gut Medicaid, the program responsible for funding nearly half of baby deliveries and most of nursing home care. It would allow insurers in some states to deny coverage based on a previous medical condition.
What would plan do? Who knows?
And it would allow insurers to skip coverage of essential services, including maternity care.
That’s all bad enough, but the Graham-Cassidy measure adds a new level of cynicism. Unlike previous efforts, it would retain — at least for the next 10 years — some of the revenue now helping lowincome Americans buy private insurance. This money, however, would be redirected to states as block grants, with states that vote largely Republican faring far better than Democratic ones. In other words, it would punish those who vote against this ill-considered measure while rewarding those who vote for it.
This measure is destructive, not only to the systems that everyday Americans rely on for their health and well-being, but also to the institutions that make America a governable nation. No hearings have been held, and no Congressional Budget Office analysis has been completed.
Many of the plan’s supporters don’t seem to know, or even care, what’s in it. All they care about is fulfilling promises to repeal Obamacare. They make the Affordable Care Act sound like some radical, left-wing experiment. It’s not. It is a sensible, if imperfect, law that draws heavily on the HEART Act, a largely Republican plan proposed in the 1990s.
About 20 million Americans have gained coverage as the result of ACA’s passage in 2010. About 32 million would lose coverage if the latest Senate Republican measure became law, assuming that the CBO “scores” it like the previous repeal-and-replace measure, which fell one vote short in July.
Graham-Cassidy is terrifyingly close to passage in the Senate now. And Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that it would pass the House if it got that far.
At the same time, it is something of a Hail Mary pass. Several Republican senators had joined a bipartisan effort, which appears to have fallen apart for now, to shore up the shaky marketplaces in the ACA and don’t relish going back to the divisive world of repeal.
The Senate Republican sponsors have just until the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 to get their repeal measure through using a special procedural tool that allows them to pass the bill with a simple majority.
They will have to flip one of the three GOP senators who voted no the last time, while not losing anyone else.
Americans can only hope that at least three of the 52 Republican senators will show some courage, and let this Hail Mary pass fall harmlessly to the ground.