The requisite Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score of the Senate “Obamacare” repeal bill that evil GOP bastard Mitch McConnell has been trying to delay as long as possible was released on Monday, and its conclusions are brutal. Steven Benen explains, CBO: Senate Republican plan would take coverage from 22 million:
During the debate over the House Republican plan, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) made clear she was unimpressed with the GOP proposal. Any bill resulting “in 23 million people losing coverage is not a bill that I can support,” the Maine Republican said in March.
OK, how about 22 million?
The Senate health care bill would insure 22 million fewer people after a decade than current law, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
It would save $321 billion in the same period overall by spending $1 trillion less on health care and using the savings to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s taxes, which primarily affect wealthy individuals and medical companies.
The CBO’s full report is online here. Note that the impact imposed on the nation would be felt almost immediately – there would be 15 million more uninsured Americans next year, which happens to be an election year, according to the non-partisan office’s estimate – before getting worse in the years that follow.
Complicating matters, the CBO score added, “By 2026, among people under age 65, enrollment in Medicaid would fall by about 16 percent and an estimated 49 million people would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law.”
I should concede that this report is quite a bit worse than I thought it’d be. Senate Republican leaders worked fairly closely with CBO officials while writing their secret legislation, getting periodic updates. Indeed, it’s one of the reasons the CBO score, which would ordinarily take two weeks, was turned around so quickly.
With this in mind, I figured Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office would carefully game the system, and tweak his blueprint in such a way that the numbers would look less awful. But if that was the plan, it failed spectacularly: the CBO’s findings are, or at least should be, a punch to the gut of proponents of Senate Republicans’ legislation.
Donald Trump has gone out of his way lately to say he wants to see a health care bill “with heart.” By any sensible standard, it’s now painfully obvious that the GOP legislation fails this simple test.
Republicans like to pretend their bill wouldn’t cut Medicaid, but the CBO report discredits the argument. Republicans like to argue that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t cover enough Americans, and the CBO report shows that the GOP’s alternative would make matters vastly worse. Republicans like to argue that the consumer costs are too high under the ACA, and the CBO report points to much higher costs for the poor, who’ll be left with worse coverage.
For Senate Republicans who remain on the fence, unsure whether to prioritize party loyalty over health security, the Congressional Budget Office has helped answer the question in rather dramatic fashion.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) tweeted Monday evening that she’ll vote to block Republican health-care bill:
Collins made the announcement a few hours after the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary analysis of the Senate Republicans’ health-care proposal, which estimates that in 10 years, if the plan passes, 22 million more people would be uninsured than if the Affordable Care Act remained the law. “I want to work with my GOP and Dem colleagues to fix the flaws in ACA,” she tweeted. “CBO analysis shows Senate bill won’t do it. I will vote no on mtp,” meaning motion to proceed.
“CBO says 22 million people lose insurance,” she continued. “Medicaid cuts hurt most vulnerable Americans; access to health care in rural areas threatened. Senate bill doesn’t fix ACA problems for rural Maine. Our hospitals are already struggling. 1 in 5 Mainers are on Medicaid.”
Evil GOP bastard Mitch McConnell cannot afford to lose more than two votes, and now at least eight GOP senators have publicly noted their displeasure with the bill. Only Sen. Collins and possibly Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) are likely no votes. The others are simply using their “displeasure” with the bill as leverage to negotiate even more onerous provisions in the bill. In the end these Teabaggers will vote for anything to keep the process moving along. We are still searching for a third Tea-Publican ready for his or her “profiles in courage” moment to stand up and be counted as opposed to this travesty of a bill. If they had an conscience and a soul, it should not be a difficult decision for them.
Keep calling your senators and demand that they vote no on thhis bill.
So millions of people lose insurance, this will mainly impact the elderly, the sick, and the very young, and tens of thousands of people will die from lack of healthcare.
We’re going to need an old priest and a young priest and some holy water, the GOP has a serious infestation of evil.