Campaign Action
Most reports indicate that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is going to settle for a "skinny repeal" of Obamacare and convince his caucus that the House will fix it. You might remember House Speaker Paul Ryan convincing his wavering caucus to vote for his Zombie Trumpcare bill because the Senate would fix it. Yeah, that. Anyway, here's the lowdown on "skinny repeal," as far as anyone knows thus far.
Here's how the "skinny repeal" scenario could go down: If senators find 50 votes to start debate on the bill, they are expected to take up both a clean bill to partially repeal Obamacare's spending and all of its taxes as well as the repeal-and-replace legislation they’ve been working on for months.
Neither bill appears able to pass; both lack the support of 50 of the 52 Senate Republicans. Senate leaders have started promising reluctant senators that if they pass a bill, any bill, they will go into negotiations with the House and fix the legislation there.
In order to get to conference, though, leadership needs a bill that can get 50 votes. Eliminating the penalty for Obamacare's individual mandate—possibly along with its employer mandate and some of its taxes on the health care industry—might be the only plan that can win such broad support within the Republican conference. […]
"The whole emphasis is we're trying to get something to go to conference committee with," a Senate Republican aide said on Tuesday. "I don't know if it's the main plan. But we have to get something done."
Vox got confirmation from three lobbyists—and lobbyists know more than anyone what McConnell is doing!—that this "lowest common denominator product" was now the plan. The whole goal here is to get to conference. Handily, as Kaiser Family Foundation's Larry Levitt reminds us, the Congressional Budget Office has scored a version of skinny repeal. The bottom line: it would lead to a 20 percent premium spike and kick 15 million off of insurance. But that's not really the end goal, Levitt says.
So here’s where all the “negotiating” with the so-called moderates over opioid funding, softening the Medicaid cuts, and bribes like the Klondike Kickback ends up: Nowhere. This new approach from McConnell is a big kiss-off to the moderates, shutting them out of what the final conference bill is going to be. If they move forward today with the motion to proceed, that’s no more than they deserve. Maybe, just maybe, they realize that now.
Here are the reported undecideds, the senators whose states have the most to lose. Call them. Tell them to bring this travesty to a screeching halt by voting "no" on the motion to proceed.
Make your Republican senator feel the heat. Call their office EVERY DAY at (202) 224-3121 to demand that they say NO to repealing Obamacare and ripping health care away from millions of Americans. After your call, tell us how it went.