Campaign Action
Just as he feared, the Independence Day recess did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell no favors when it comes to scrounging up 50 votes in favor of Trumpcare. A town meeting in tiny Palco, Kansas, is just one example of what the handful of Republican senators who came out of hiding last week faced. In a town of less than 300 people, 150 showed up to talk to Sen. Jerry Moran about Trumpcare, and Moran emerged as the latest hold-out against the bill as currently written, along with John Hoeven of North Dakota, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, John Boozman of Arkansas, and Bob Corker of Tennessee.
Grassley is particularly interesting, having panned a proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz that seems to be gaining some steam with McConnell. Grassley calls the Cruz scheme "subterfuge to get around pre-existing conditions," which it is. But Cruz and his best buddy, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, are digging in on the plan.
Cruz and Lee, a Texan and Utahn, are an imminent problem for McConnell. They worked alongside leadership for months but now are demanding a more conservative approach than the GOP’s initial draft. Conservative groups and the Trump administration now support their addition, highlighting a clash among Republican senators with differing health care ideologies. The bill almost certainly would fail without Cruz and Lee's support.
The duo spent the break advocating for their Consumer Freedom Act, which would allow the sale of cheap, deregulated health care plans alongside Obamacare-compliant plans with protections for pre-existing conditions and other minimum benefits. They argue that allowing more diversity in insurance plans would reduce premiums, but critics say the approach would shift sick people into one risk pool and healthy people into another, a recipe for a market meltdown.
Lee will vote against any bill that does not include their amendment or something similar that guts regulations, his office said.
The Congressional Budget Office is expected to release its score of the various tweaks—including the Cruz scheme—this week, and that score is likely to be very bad, which could spell the end of Cruz’s rebellion.
The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Karen Pollitz analyzed the Cruz proposal, and says it would make insurance unaffordable for people who didn't qualify for the bill's tax credits, and would cost taxpayers "way more than the federal government is spending now" on Obamacare subsidies.
But Cruz, Lee, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul are still likely to insist on undermining the Affordable Care Act's regulations with measures that will drive away the not-as-extremist Republicans, who campaigned on repeal but also on keeping the protections for people with pre-existing conditions. McConnell will try to throw money at various senators to get them on board but because of the massive Medicaid cuts, he's not going to get the number of people kicked off insurance much below 17 million—and with less savings. He's going into this week with an extremely big challenge, which we have to make even more difficult. Don't let the phones stop ringing in Republican Senate offices.
Make your Republican senator feel the heat. Call their office EVERY DAY at (202) 224-3121 to demand that they say NO to ripping health care away from millions of Americans. No on Trumpcare. Then, tell us how it went.