Michael Hiltzik/LA Times:
How many people will die from the Republicans' Obamacare repeal bills? Tens of thousands per year
How many people would lose their lives if the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act succeeds? Estimates of this inherently murky statistic vary, but the range is from about 28,000 to nearly 100,000 a year.
That’s a shocking toll from an effort that is essentially aimed at gifting the wealthiest Americans with hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts by slashing healthcare. So no one should be surprised that Republican and conservative supporters of the House and Senate repeal bills have spent a lot of time claiming that nothing of the sort will happen. The effort moved into high gear this weekend, following Thursday’s unveiling of the Senate GOP’s version of ACA repeal.
NY Times:
McConnell’s Reputation as a Master Tactician Takes a Hit
On those key issues, Mr. McConnell put his legislative thumb on the scale in favor of conservatives, quickly alienating many senators from states that had expanded Medicaid, such as Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Ms. Collins, who became an early and vocal opponent of the bill.
Remember this next time and respect but stop fearing the turtle’s shadow. Remember also that sometimes the “savvy” analysts are the worst ones. The dynamic and tension between Senators and Governors an important stories (see Dean Heller’s voice in NV). DC is out of touch, the governors are not. See Alex Burns, below.
Alex Burns/NY Times:
Hours before Senate Republicans delayed a vote on the bill, Mr. Kasich denounced his own party’s legislation in biting terms, saying that it would victimize the poor and mentally ill, and redirect tax money “to people who are already very wealthy.”
“This bill,” Mr. Kasich said, “is unacceptable.”
But the governor-led plot to block the Republican health care bill extends well beyond Mr. Kasich and Mr. Hickenlooper. Aiding their cause has been an eclectic array of ideological mavericks and quirky personalities in both parties, who have feared the harm that repealing the Affordable Care Act could cause in their states.
Politico notes a fate worse than death, apparently:
McConnell warns Trump, GOP on health bill failure
If Obamacare repeal fails in the Senate, the GOP might be forced to compromise with Democrats.
McConnell has told senators for weeks that he fears a failed repeal effort would be followed by a large bailout of the insurance industry that would be supported by moderate Republicans and Democrats, per people familiar with his thinking. And McConnell would be content to not touch Obamacare repeal again if this bill failed.
David Brooks/NY times with a fascinating piece:
Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can’t argue for their plans. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price came to the Aspen Ideas Festival to make the case for the G.O.P. approach. It’s not that he had bad arguments; he had no arguments, no vision for the sort of health care system these bills would usher in. He filled his time by rising to a level of vapid generality that was utterly detached from the choices in the actual legislation.
Because Republicans have no national vision, they seem largely uninterested in the actual effects their legislation would have on the country at large. This Senate bill would be completely unworkable because anybody with half a brain would get insurance only when they got sick.
STAT:
This mother voted for Trump to curb the opioid crisis. She’s not happy with how things are going
A Democrat who’d voted for Obama, Wilson backed Trump because she thought he could help in the state with by far the highest overdose death rate in the nation.
Like Trump, Wilson thinks Obamacare is broken. But she doesn’t believe that rushing through the GOP health care plan is the answer. The bill now before the Senate would make deep cuts in Medicaid spending and phase out the extra federal funds that Obamacare gave states to expand Medicaid. That funding accounts for nearly half of all spending on substance abuse treatment in West Virginia, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, has estimated that 50,000 residents have received addiction treatment because of the Medicaid expansion funds that will be eliminated under the bill.
“I’m against Trump and McConnell, [pushing to] vote on it this week,” Wilson told STAT over the weekend. “Go home to your constituents and talk about it. Why wouldn’t you sit down to come up with a plan and do it right than rush and fix it later? Once you do this, you can’t go back.”
But don’t worry, she still supports Trump.
Atul Guwande/New Yorker:
How the Senate’s Health-Care Bill Threatens the Nation’s Health
To understand how the Senate Republicans’ health-care bill would affect people’s actual health, the first thing you have to understand is that incremental care—regular, ongoing care as opposed to heroic, emergency care—is the greatest source of value in modern medicine. There is clear evidence that people who get sufficient incremental care enjoy better prevention, earlier diagnosis and management of urgent conditions, better control of chronic illnesses, and longer life spans.
When more people get health-insurance coverage, as they did following the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, they get more incremental care. This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper that I co-authored with Katherine Baicker and Ben Sommers, two health economists at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, in which we analyzed the health effects of insurance coverage. We looked at dozens of studies put out over the last decade, and found that insurance-coverage expansions—including not just the A.C.A but also past Medicaid expansions and the health-care reform that Massachusetts passed in 2006—have consistently and significantly increased the number of people who have a regular source of care and who can afford the care they need. Insurance expansions have made people more likely to get primary and preventive care, chronic-illness care, and needed medications—including cancer screenings, diabetes and blood-pressure medicines, depression treatment, and surgery for cancer before it is too late.
Great long read.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Will GOP moderates fold and give Trump a win? If so, they lied to you.
But what the CBO report really tells us is this: No side deal can actually rescue the bill in any meaningful sense from the moral criticism that these moderate Republicans themselves have lodged against it. A few moderates may end up backing the bill — and it may even pass — but if so, they will be largely embracing priorities that they basically asked us to believe they reject as unacceptable.
Noah Rothman/Commentary:
A Moment of Truth for Trump Defenders on Health Care
Trump puts the commentary class in an uncomfortable position.
This is a complicated endeavor, and the stakes are high. Its participants are engaging in it in good faith. Notably absent from the barricades is the man in whose name they are ostensibly acting. President Donald Trump has not been absent from the fight to shape the public’s perception on the health-care bill; he’s been actively undermining the Republican position. In the effort to avoid tough choices at the likely expense of his political allies, Trump has put a test to his phalanx of fans in the commentary class.
Will pro-Trump voices note honestly that their party’s leader is exacerbating the headwinds the GOP faces in making good on a campaign-trail pledge to repeal and replace ObamaCare? So far, the answer to that question is “no.”
Jay Bookman/AJC:
Bald-faced lying to defend the indefensible
So …. got that? High deductibles are bad, because as Price points out, they discourage people from using the system and getting treatment. If you believe Price, that’s a problem that Republicans intend to fix.
Yet it’s a lie. Under the Senate bill being pushed by Price and other Republicans, deductibles would soar even higher. They would soar not by accident, but as a result of conscious, deliberate policy decisions written into the bill that are designed to drive those deductibles higher.¹ The intent is to make people pay more out of their own pockets for health care, through higher deductibles and co-pays, so that they will be less likely to get treatment.
Price absolutely knows that. Price embraces that theory. So when he complains about high deductibles in the current system, implying that the Republican version is going to make it better, he is engaging in all-out, conscious, cynical deception on a scale that is shocking even in the political world. And that’s only the beginning.
