Every unhinged tweet, childish Bannon utterance, and bald-faced lie about Russia that comes out of the white house in the next week is probably meant to distract from this. And much of the media will probably take the bait.
Senate Republicans will see a Congressional Budget Office score before the vote, unlike their House counterparts
LOL. And if it doesn’t say what they want it to say they’ll just disparage the office and call it partisan and still vote a big fat YES on it.
Why are there not ads decrying the secrecy of this process?
Let me guess Bob, there’s a huge tax break for the rich, which winnows down health care options for everyone else.
This is utterly legislative malpractice.
I hope that Mukowski and Collins defect, leaving it, once again, for women to save us from these destructive Republican men.
Senate Republicans will see a Congressional Budget Office score before the vote
Will the rest of the country see the CBO score, or will the Republicans hide that as well?
I’m not optimistic at all, but I think that once the bill comes out, McConnell will have hell to pay. I hope this strategy of making bills in secret doesn’t work, and I suspect it will not work.
I keep harping on this, because it’s important: the bill they gave the CBO to score is not the bill they’ll be voting on. The one they vote on will likely be significantly worse, as the house one was. It may also not meet reconcilation rules. But we won’t know that until after the vote. Which is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
I’d say no. They will not release the score until the bill is introduced. If the CBO has been rigged, Health Economists will be on the means and methods like white on rice. If the score reveals bad outcomes for public health, that will raise hell. McConnell just needs a score that will allow him to pass the bill under reconcilation. Probably he just wants to throw the lowest number of people off insurance, while maintaining reconcilation parameters. He’ll make the rest up as he goes along later. Something something, Obama, failing ACA, whatever.
These hypocritical frauds…they whined for 6+ years about how they didn’t have ‘time’ to read the ACA before it was ‘rushed through’ to a vote…they had a fking YEAR. NOW they ‘hope’ they have enough time to peruse it before sticking to the American public. And they ‘wonder’ why everyone hates their guts.
“This is a very important issue. You know, we shouldn’t try to do it in the dark. And whatever final bill is produced should be available to the American public and to the members of the Senate, certainly, for enough time to come to grips with it… And we are going to insist — and the American people are going to insist — that it be done in a transparent, a fair and open way.”
– Mitch McConnell, October of 2009
Hypothetical asked a dozen times with no good answer:
Assume either the Senate fails to pass a bill, Reconciliation fails, or Trump does not sign a bill.
IMO, any of these seems more likely to happen than to not happen.
Where does this leave the ACA and what happens to health care insurance?
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mitch McConnel–A Truly Patriotic American. Gag! Retch! 
The republicans are estimated to kill around 43,000 Americans with their repeal of Healthcare Rights and the Affordable Care Act. That’s not including the millions who will sink into medical misery and bankruptcy.
These men are killers. These are the men who did it.
Remember that.
They’re really gonna do it.
How can you say this isn’t transparent, fair and open? Nearly two dozen rich white men are involved in the discussion.
Is that 43,000 total, or 43,000 a year?
My understanding is that is the aggregate number of deaths based on the removal of the ACA and the medicare expansion.
Morally it makes no difference. Frankly one death would be one too many as the result of a deliberate act such as this.
While I’m with all of you, I really don’t think everyone is getting the full horror of the implications. I think people are so transfixed by the implications for those who are going to be immediately impacted, and for the ripple effects it will have for most of the rest of us, they aren’t really grasping the full magnitude of how dire this is.
McConnell and fourteen other rich white men are drafting a bill affecting one sixth of our GDP in secret. The bill in question is opposed by a majority of the American people and will be even more opposed once it is made public and they very conspicuously don’t care.
No committee hearings, no time to read, consider, obtain comment from the public–or, indeed, even from corporate lobbyists and stakeholders. McConnell intends to ram it through the Senate in gross and cynical violation of the Senate rules and all the established norms about how big policy matters are legislated and litigated in a liberal democracy.
The sole objective of the bill, the entire objective, is to fund a tax cut for a handful of billionaire oligarchs who have been agitating against the ACA, which was funded by a tax on the rich, since it was passed. And to fund that tax cut tens of thousands of people who aren’t rich will be condemned to death and vast numbers more to preventable disabilities. Meanwhile, not a single industry player–not Big Pharma, not providers, not insurers, has indicated any support. Instead, most of them have somehow been silenced.
Consider further that this comes in the context of action on a bill from a House of Representatives that was also passed without committee hearings or a public airing, in extraordinary violation of democratic norms, a House whose majority is the result of partisan gerrymandering, not popular votes. And at the urging of a president who lost the popular vote by an historic margin under circumstances increasingly indicating the result was manipulated by a hostile foreign power espousing and seeking to spread an explicitly anti-democratic, hypernationalistic, authoritarian, oligarchic ideology.
This is being done through brazen, sneering transgression of all of the norms that make us, or at least made us, a democracy. It is, the culmination of two decades of, and I use the word advisedly, rape of the democratic process and republican traditions generally, the rules of both chambers, the boundaries and unwritten conventions that once made our inherently unworkable separation of powers system function.
This deliberate, willful, gleeful trampling of the rights and interests of the poor, working class and middle class in service to the pecuniary interests of a handful of obscenely wealthy outright oligarchs–the Kochs, the Mercers, the DeVos clan, the Walton crime family, and their ilk–is a a declaration of victory in a war on democracy that was openly declared when the Roberts Court handed down Citizens United and that has continued marching from victory to victory while we sat around with our heads up our asses, telling ourselves that Obama’s two wins meant we were staying even, even while state legislatures were purchased, Congressional elections were won, districts were gerrymandered, vote suppression laws were passed.
This grotesque, evil atrocity unfolding in darkness isn’t about healthcare or health insurance or an industry. It is nothing less than a declaration that we’re now just another Putinized sham democracy perpetrated by people who are confident we can’t do anything about it.
That’s how bad this really is. Get your heads around it and act accordingly.