Remember when the Republicans used to caterwaul about not knowing what’s in the bill?
THE REPUBLICAN EFFORT TO slash Medicaid stalled on Friday, when legislation cutting more than $625 billion from the program failed to get through a key House committee.
GOP leaders said they hope to try again on Sunday night. That presumably means they are spending the weekend frantically negotiating in private, trying to secure votes from a handful of holdout Republicans—all in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” of spending reductions and tax cuts moving through the House.
He notes that the delays have been a big subject of discussion in that they show the GOP is in disarray, yadda, yadda, yadda. But that’s missing the point:
When they released an actual bill last Sunday evening, they announced at the same time that the Energy and Commerce Committee would take it up on Tuesday—not even two days later, and so quickly that the Congressional Budget Office wouldn’t have time to produce a full, detailed cost estimate. Then came the hearings themselves: an uninterrupted, 26-hour run through deliberations (the “markup” of the legislation) that ended with a party-line vote to approve the bill and send it to the Budget Committee, where it now sits.
In all, lawmakers had less than 72 hours to digest, debate, and vote on deep Medicaid cuts that—according to CBO’s preliminary, partial estimate—will cause more than 7 million Americans to lose health insurance and millions more to face higher medical costs.1
He reminds us of the many different committees, numerous hearings, mark-up,s deliberations, public comments over months when passing the Affordable Care Act 2009. But:
This time around, Energy and Commerce is the only house committee working on health legislation. Want to guess how many hearings it had in preparation for Donald Trump’s big bill?
There actually are savings available, such as the Medicare Advantage program, but they aren’t interested in those since it impacts their corporate owners. They’re rushing this through so they can get it done before anyone figures out what’s in it because it’s very unpopular with the public. I guess they figure the voters will never know what they did.
Once I would have thought that was unlikely. Now, with the news so fragmented and so much propaganda and disinformation I wonder. At this point I’d guess that at least 40% will blame Joe Biden for any Ill effects. Surely that’s what Dear Leader will tell them.