Today Senate Republicans unveiled their own attempt at healthcare "reform." It is meaner than the House bill, will likely leave even more Americans without insurance, and is targeted especially at phasing out the Medicaid program as we now know it. A roundup of what we know and what's happened so far:
URGENT: Give your Republican senator a piece of your mind about Trumpcare.
• The text of the bill—introduced as a "discussion draft" by Republicans—reveals an effort even more extreme than the House Republican version. It strips subsidies for insurance, replacing them with tax credits and reducing the number of families that can get them. As with the House bill, older Americans are especially hard-hit. It not only allows states to waive essential health benefits, allowing plans to be sold which refuse coverage for maternity care, cancer treatments, or other carve-outs, but does away with the requirement that those waivers be granted only if the state can provide equivalent coverage.
But the most dramatic measure is a phase-out of the Medicaid program. Not only is the expansion of Medicaid undone, but states would be free to eliminate coverage altogether; deep cuts to federal funding would all but require that they do so.
We won't know coverage estimates until the Congressional Budget Office is able to analyze and score the bill, but expectations are that the Senate bill will uninsure more Americans than even the House version.
• Sen. Bob Casey's office provided a public rundown of some of the biggest individual planks: The requirement that insurers cover certain essential health benefits is stripped. Price protections for those with preexisting conditions are stripped. "Decimating" Medicaid. A pittance towards the opioid epidemic—less than a twentieth of what Republican senators were previously demanding. And on, and on.
• A measure of how gargantuan the tax cuts for wealthy Americans are, and how much Medicaid coverage needed to be stripped in order to provide them: The "tax cuts that the 400 wealthiest families will get" from the Senate's healthcare repeal bill "roughly equal the federal cost of maintaining the expansion in Nevada, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Alaska combined."
• Protests outside McConnell's offices were met with arrests, with officers forcibly removing some disabled protesters from their wheelchairs and handcuffing others while still seated in them. The protesters were unable to meet with McConnell because he is a coward.
• Defending his decision to allow no Democratic lawmakers to see the bill before its introduction, Mitch McConnell said that Democrats "made clear early on they did not want to work with us."
• After a show of coming out against the Senate bill, supposedly wayward Republican senators quickly hinted at what it would take to get them aboard, and it wouldn't take much. Sen. Ron Johnson said it would take "proper information", whatever that's to mean, and Sen. Ted Cruz passed out printed flyers listing his own demands.
• On Twitter, former acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Andy Slavitt laid out which Americans would lose the most from the bill: "Older people will be charged much more. Ppl over 350% of poverty won't get any support. Insurance will only cover 58% of someone's needs." HIV patients, cancer patients, nursing home patients and more: "The Senate bill hurts kids by putting a capped price tag on their lives too."
• Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren condemned the bill from the Senate floor. "These cuts are blood money. People will die. Let's be very clear—Senate Republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with American lives."
• President Barack Obama pulled no punches in his own critique of the Senate bill, calling it "not a health care bill" but a "massive transfer of wealth" to the "richest people in America." "Simply put, if there's a chance you might get sick, get old, or start a family—this bill will do you harm."
• We don't have any polls for the Senate version yet because McConnell and the other senators refused to state what would be in their bill until releasing it this morning, but polls of the (less extreme!) House bill show that only 16% of Americans consider the House version a "good idea"—and only 34% of Republican voters approve of the bill. These polls hint at why Senate Republicans plan to speed the bill to a vote as quickly as possible: Not only is the plan massively unpopular, it's been getting even more unpopular with each passing week.
URGENT: Give your Republican senator a piece of your mind about Trumpcare.