Jeet Heer/New Republic:
From the audio, Jacobs does not sound at all badgering or aggressive, nor does Gianforte seem to have asked Jacobs to lower the recorder. The campaign’s statement shouldn’t be taken as a factual document, but rather a political one: Jacobs is identified as a “liberal journalist,” after all. Ahead of Thursday election, Gianforte’s campaign has decided to batten down the hatches and make an appeal to the GOP base, people inclined to be suspicious of liberal journalists.
Politico:
Obamacare repeal is in trouble in the Senate, and a nonpartisan analysis of the House’s repeal legislation issued Wednesday only reinforced that reality.
Within minutes of the release of the report showing 23 million fewer Americans would be insured over a decade, two Senate Republicans blasted the estimate and the House bill, underscoring just how much the legislation will have to change to get through the upper chamber.
Vox:
The many ways Trump has tried to intervene in the Russia investigation, in one chart
He may not know how else to get what he wants.
During the campaign, he bragged about his ability to bend people to his will. All it took was a little greasing of the wheels — with money, power, and a bit of charm.
“As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal in 2015. He even bragged that a donation got Hillary Clinton to come to his wedding.
The key here is that Trump believed he controlled them, and because of that, he could use them to get what he wanted.
Dave A. Hopkins from March:
How the New Health Care Bill Confirms the Asymmetry of the Parties
The Democratic Party is composed of a number of discrete social groups, each of which pressures party leaders to support and enact policies designed to ameliorate specific perceived problems faced by the group. For decades, Democratic constituencies have demanded that their party act to provide health care benefits to vulnerable populations—a goal that was addressed by the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, the Children's Health Insurance Program in the 1990s, and the Affordable Care Act in 2009–2010.
By and large, Democrats are less concerned about the mechanics by which a policy is implemented than they are about the real-world effects of that policy. For example, the Affordable Care Act did not reflect an overarching ideological vision for the nation's health care sector, but instead was designed to minimize disruption to the existing system (in order to increase its chances of passage through Congress) while extending insurance and other benefits to a greater proportion of the public….
But the lack of interest in the CBO score also demonstrates what the central purpose of the bill actually is. For Democrats, the point of enacting the ACA was to increase the number of Americans who had health insurance, and any legislation that failed to significantly reduce the ranks of the uninsured was, by that standard, not worth passing. Validation from outside experts that the ACA would indeed fulfill the goal of coverage expansion was thus necessary in order to maintain party support.
Republicans, in contrast, are much more indifferent to the question of what effect their own replacement bill will have on the number of insured Americans. An unfavorable CBO score will be politically damaging, to be sure, but is less likely to influence their evaluation of the inherent merits of the legislation. (Reducing the size of the Medicaid program is fully consistent with the ideological objectives of the party—a feature, not a bug.)
Adam Taylor/WaPo:
Obama was in the German capital on Thursday morning to appear alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a biannual festival organized by the German protestant church. The two spoke in front of a large crowd at the iconic Brandenburg Gate, with Obama going out of his way to praise Merkel.
“Not only do I love this city, but one of my favorite partners throughout my presidency is sitting next to me,” Obama said with a smile.
Speaking at the democracy-themed event, he also appeared to offer thinly veiled criticism of Trump, then only a few hundred miles away in Belgium. “We can’t isolate ourselves. We can’t hide behind a wall,” he said, prompting cheers from the audience…
Trump also had a private lunch with new French President Emmanuel Macron at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Thursday — a meeting that prompted a widely mocked photograph of the pair shaking hands, if nothing else.
ArkTimes:
The ACA's crafters essentially made a deal with hospitals: The ACA cut Medicare reimbursements, but the reduction in uncompensated care through the Medicaid expansion helped offset some of those cuts. Without that offsetting boost, some of the state's smaller rural hospitals might not be able to survive. A hospital like Baxter — the fifth most Medicare-reliant hospital in the nation, according to Moody's, thanks to the community's significant proportion of retirees — would be forced to make dramatic cuts in services without the Medicaid offset. "The expansion of Medicaid through Arkansas Works is one of the key components that's been able to help us through the change in the ACA," Peterson said. "Not just Baxter, but it helps all of rural Arkansas."…
Without the Medicaid expansion, Peterson said, the hospital would be forced to make difficult — and potentially life-threatening — choices about what services to cut. That would impact everyone who relies on Baxter Regional, not just those covered by the Medicaid expansion. Servicing a remote community in the Ozarks with a population that isn't growing, it's unclear how the hospital would make up the funding gap if expansion goes away.
"The numbers do not add up," Peterson said. "Unless you want to abandon people who live in rural America."
and/but this part:
Haynes voted in the presidential race for the first time last November and, like most of his neighbors, he voted for Trump. "I felt like we were going to be in the same position no matter what Hillary did, we needed some improvements, and I really just wanted a guy that wasn't involved in politics," Haynes said. He said he has been watching the progress of the AHCA with concern, particularly when the Congressional Budget Office found in March that an earlier version of the bill would lead to 24 million fewer people being covered (the CBO is set to issue a new score for the amended version of the AHCA this week).
"I guess I was naive because when he spoke 'change,' in my mind, I thought 'even better,' " he said. "And then as it moved along and 24 million people weren't going to get coverage, I thought, 'What's going on? Am I one of the 24 million?' "…
Haynes said he's still grateful for President Obama. "I'd vote for the man tomorrow," Haynes said. "I don't play politics. But the man did a lot for me, period. Without Obamacare, I wouldn't be sitting here. How would you feel?"
Jonathan Cohn/HuffPost:
It Turns Out Critics Of The GOP Health Care Plan Were Right All Along
Yup, those promises to protect people with pre-existing conditions were lies.
If they get their way, they will protect the strong at the expense of the weak ― rewarding the rich and the healthy in ways that punish the poor and the sick.
Republicans have tried mightily to deny this, and accused their critics of dishonesty. President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) ― they and their allies have insisted over and over again that their proposals would improve access to health care and protect people with pre-existing medical conditions.
But it’s the Republicans who are lying about what their plan to repeal Obamacare would do.