Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

New Trumpcare Deserves a Quick Death

David Leonhardt SEPT. 13, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/trumpcare-health-care-cassidy-graham.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: There they go again.

On Wednesday, a group of Republican senators plan to release a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It comes from Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and they will market it as a bill that gives states the flexibility to create the system that they want.

But that’s deeply misleading. While it would theoretically give states more flexibility, the bill would mostly rob states of money to pay for health insurance — and millions of Americans would lose coverage as a result. Think of it this way: Every reader of this newsletter has the theoretical flexibility to buy a private jet.

Cassidy-Graham, as the bill is known, ends up looking remarkably similar to previous repeal attempts. It would likely result in 15 million Americans losing their insurance next year and more than 30 million losing it a decade from now (based on analyses of an early version of the bill, which was similar to previous Republican health bills). “The similarities are more striking than the differences,” Aviva Aron-Dine of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told me.

Right now, the bill looks unlikely to pass, because several Republicans, including Rand Paul, sound unenthusiastic, and it faces a Sept. 30 deadline, as a result of Senate rules. But I still take the bill seriously. President Trump supports it, as apparently do many Senate Republicans.

The lesson of the last year has been that Republican health plans can quickly change from long shots to near passage. They often benefit from a lack of attention. When the subject moves out of the spotlight, members of Congress feel more comfortable with the notion of taking health care away from millions of people. When people pay attention — and get mad — Congress steps back.

There is also good reason to hope that Cassidy-Graham dies quickly. Members of both parties — like Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican — now seem open to a bipartisan bill to fix some of Obamacare’s problems. A Senate committee held a hearing on the subject yesterday. But it was clear at the hearing that Republicans have a hard time talking publicly about bipartisan compromise so long as the fantasy of a beneficial repeal bill remains alive.

“It is because we need bipartisanship that I want this to fail,” Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicare and Medicaid in the Obama administration, tweeted, referring to the Cassidy-Graham bill.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/trumpcare-health-care-cassidy-graham.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists