The new Affordable Care Act repeal bill introduced by Senators Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina), Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), Dean Heller (R-Nevada) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) was more cruel and heartless than previous attempts at repealing the ACA:
- Coverage losses for an estimated 32 million within 10 years
- Ending Medicaid expansion for 11 million low-income adults
- Cuts to coverage for low income seniors, children and people with disabilities
- Ending federal protections for pre-existing conditions, lifetime caps and essential benefits.
There’s been no hearings, no CBO score, nothing. And since Lindsay Graham is on board, his good friend John McCain might support this bill. The bill has until September 30, the end of the current fiscal year to get through. There is a real chance that ACA can be repealed this time and we need to be focusing on stopping our congress from taking away healthcare for millions. And yet it’s getting so little press it’s scary. Instead of bringing attention to the devastating effects of this bill, we have Bernie Sanders and a group of gullible democrats proposing Bernie’s Medicare for All bill.
The timing couldn’t be worst. Lindsay Graham is already using Bernie as a scare tactic to drum up support claiming the new ACA repeal is Bernie Sanders’ “worst nightmare” and claims that this bill is “stopping a march towards socialism.” They’ve even resurrected the claims of “socialist medicine” and “death panels”. At this point, I have to wonder if Bernie is actively trying to sabotage the ACA himself. Maybe he feels like so many of his supporters that with the ACA destroyed, universal health care will have an easier path to being implemented. That will happen right after Bernie arrives on a unicorn to pass out rainbows to the white working class.
Republicans control state houses; they control congress, the courts and the white house. Any bill that passes will take years to remove. Years in which people with pre-existing conditions will be charged whatever amounts the insurance companies decide (part of the Graham bill), people who relied on Medicaid will lose their insurance in the states that aren’t required to fund it, and people who are finally getting health insurance sometimes for the first time in their lives will be back in the emergency rooms until the GOP gets rid of that policy too.
Bernie could have pulled this stunt after the ACA repeal was officially dead. But that would require him to have a real strategy other than getting press while Hillary is on her book tour. And make no mistake about it; Bernie's bill is not even original. Bernie has the nickname “amendment king” for a reason; he attaches himself to the work of others, and then claims it as his own. Representative John Conyers from Michigan introduced Medicare for All on January 24, 2017 like he has done every single year since 2003; every single year. Conyers’ H.R. 676 - Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Act has 119 co-sponsors, I’m going to let you guess who one of them isn’t.
So Sanders is grandstanding. His bill (or Conyers’ bill that he calls his own now) has no chance in hell of being passed with this congress and this president. There is no chance that it will even be brought to the floor. The only guarantee that Sanders has is that he will get some good press, a few laughs from conservatives, and a fund raising scheme for his next run at the presidency. The only question remains, why did democrats with their own eyes on running in 2020 follow Sanders down this rabbit hole? And will this stunt help Graham and the rest of the GOP kill ACA for real this time?