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One of the keys to effective governance is knowing how to set priorities for the good of the nation. Republicans are still failing at that, massively and pathetically. Proof? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is promising Republican senators they can have another go at repealing the Affordable Care Act if they can get 50 votes behind their effort. By September 30. When the National Flood Insurance Program and the Children's Health Insurance Program will run out of funding. Meanwhile, something like two-thirds of the nation is being ravaged either by severe drought, by wildfire, or by hurricanes.
Sure, what the hell. One more damned stab at taking health insurance away from millions of Americans. It's not like you've had seven years to figure out how to do this—so what's another two weeks?
The longshot move would face significant obstacles, including Senator John McCain’s insistence that any health-care plan go through “regular order” of committee hearings and debate on amendments. McCain, who said in a statement Wednesday he supports the Graham-Cassidy plan’s concept, provided the critical “no” vote in July that killed the Senate’s earlier Obamacare replacement plan.
The two senators’ proposal, which they floated during the previous Obamacare debate, would send federal money to the states in block grants while repealing Obamacare’s mandates that all Americans have insurance and most employers provide it.
“This literally would repeal and replace Obamacare with a fundamentally different approach," Graham said in an interview.
At the very least, the bill will have to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. That score is likely to be bad, because there's no way many millions of people don't lose insurance in this extremely disruptive proposal.
Just in the Medicaid cuts it would create alone, millions would lose coverage. So with that score in hand, with who knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of people displaced and put out of work in the last month by natural disasters, 50 senators would have to think this was a really good time to take health insurance away from them, too.
And unless John McCain is totally bluffing, all these points would be made while the bill was going through what he demands: regular order. That would mean hearings where Democrats got to say stuff about the bill. It would mean an amendment process on the floor, where Democrats could make Republicans take really bad votes. It would mean 50 senators would have to agree to all of that. Suppose all that happens. Then there's another major obstacle: the House of Representatives. It would have to swallow the Senate bill whole and unchanged were this to work, because there will be no time for it to be changed there, go to conference, and have any changes be worked out between the two chambers.
There are just a handful of actual working days the Congress has this month in which they have to get many critical things done. That they are still wasting hours of that precious time on Obamacare repeal demonstrates just how broken Mitch McConnell's Senate is.
So we're doing this again. Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to save health care for millions of Americans by refusing to vote again on any Obamacare repeal bill.