Roger Kouchi Mitch Mcconnell’s war on health care Opinions The Senate’s three tools on health care: Sabotage, speed and secrecy (Part 1 of 2) The inside track on Washington politics. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). (Olivier Douliery/Bloomberg) By Andy Slavitt By Andy Slavitt Opinions June 10 Andy Slavitt was acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2015 to 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-senates-three-tools-on-health-care-sabotage-speed-and-secrecy/2017/06/10/11bad38e-4d5a-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.8980dfe8cbb0 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had a problem when the American Health Care Act arrived from the House last month. What to do with a bill that is clogging your agenda but only 8 percent of Americans want you to pass and members of your own caucus swore was dead on arrival? McConnell couldn’t have missed the town halls filled with angry Americans who rely on Medicaid and see the Affordable Care Act’s protections for those with preexisting conditions as a godsend. The House bill — which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would cause 23 million to lose coverage and end those protections for many — threatened all of that. Faced with that reality, McConnell could have started over and had the Senate develop its own legislation, perhaps even working with Democrats on a bipartisan alternative that could withstand the test of time. Instead, McConnell put a plan in place to pass something close to the House bill using three simple tools: sabotage, speed and secrecy. ● Sabotage: Given the unpopularity of the AHCA, Republicans have just one argument: Obamacare has failed. The GOP premise is “bad” beats “dead.” The problem is the facts don’t support this. Medicaid — which accounts for the bulk of the ACA coverage expansion — is successful, popular and bipartisan. The ACA’s individual insurance exchanges got off to an uneasy start, but after five years, insurer filings and independent reports all point to profitable insurers and stable or stabilizing markets — at least until President Trump intervened to rattle insurers. Taking advantage of those now well-documented efforts to sabotage the ACA, McConnell is reportedly telling his members they have no choice but to pass a replacement. By acting fast, McConnell hopes to minimize the continuing and mounting evidence of sabotage as insurers file rates in places such as North Carolina and Pennsylvania that explicitly break out the specific impact of Trump’s sabotage. ● Speed: As he watched House members scrupulously avoid constituents while on recess, McConnell clearly recognized that his best bet would be to hold a vote before the July 4 recess in hopes this would minimize pressure on vulnerable senators such as Nevada’s Dean Heller — who won his seat by a mere 12,000 votes in a state where more than 200,000 will lose Medicaid coverage. So last week McConnell deployed Rule XIV, a fast-track procedure that bypasses the committee process and moves the bill directly to the floor. Just as in the House, we’re on track to have a vote with no hearings (there were more than 100 for the ACA). Knowing the coverage loss will be significant, McConnell plans to vote within only days, or possibly even hours, of the release of the CBO score. Moving fast leaves opponents, and the public, with no time to catch up to the details.

Alva Jelinek To be honest, it is all I hear on any radio or any TV station with news, so if they don't know, then they aren't listening to anything, and don't know much of anything, and will bear the awful awful consequences of that. The truth is that at some point it becomes very difficult to care about people who do not take any part in what matters so much to literally their very lives. The book What's the Matter with Kansas makes the point that no matter how much the Republicans damage their constituents the constituents continue to blame the liberals, the very people who attempt to protect them. I am afraid that I am flat out of sympathy. This is the President and Congress they wanted; they have it now. I wish them luck of it.

Judy Enida Sheldon Why can't people put 2and 2 together? This is a major rewrite of Medicaid, not an Obamacare repeal. Shame on congress!!!!