At a speech to the American Hospital Association, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell "launched a fierce attack on 'Medicare for all,'" reports The Hill's Peter Sullivan. "This radical scheme would be serious bad news for America's hospital industry," he told the group. "You should not be the guinea pigs in some far-left social experiment."
Sullivan counted the mentions of issues in the speech: "'Trump': 0; 'Party of healthcare': 0; 'Texas v. Azar': 0; 'ObamaCare': 1; 'Medicare for all' or 'Medicare for none': 10 Bazillion." That's right: McConnell gave an entire speech to the AHA without once mentioning the orange elephant in the room, Trump and his lawsuit trying to do away entirely with the Affordable Care Act, the law that's brought a lot of business to hospitals. "We're for preserving what works and fixing what doesn't," McConnell told the group, never mind that the Republican Party's president is demonstrably working to destroy it all, and has no plan to fix it.
Maybe McConnell avoided the issue because he knows where the AHA stands on that lawsuit, since they filed a friend of the court brief arguing for the law to be upheld. In a statement responding to a federal judge's decision to strike down the entire law in December, the AHA said "America’s hospitals and health systems are extremely disappointed" with the decision. "The ruling puts health coverage at risk for tens of millions of Americans, including those with chronic and pre-existing conditions, while also making it more difficult for hospitals and health systems to provide access to high-quality care."
McConnell is going to be doing his level best to pretend for the next year and a half that Trump isn't trying to take health care away from millions of people, and to try to keep the focus entirely on "socialized" medicine. It's going to be a tall order, since the voting public isn't afraid of the idea at all, but knows that Republicans aren't going to do anything to protect their care.