The Senate health bill is a scathing indictment of the Republican Party

[Pelle Svanslos]

Too often, we think of politics as a game, losing ourselves in the
personalities and the strategies and the winning and losing. But the
reason it matters in the first place is that all of our lives are
affected by politics, by who holds power and what decisions they make.
And in those decisions, lawmakers reveal themselves. They show us what —
and who — is important to them. Republicans and Democrats aren't just
opposing teams, like the Yankees and Red Sox. They represent two
alternate visions of the world and two very different moral systems.

While those contrasting moralities express themselves every day in ways
large and small, every once in a while a party gets the opportunity to
make a grand statement about what it believes. That's what Republicans
in the Senate did this week when they released their version of a
health-care bill. If you want to know what today's GOP is all about, you
can find the answer woven through that bill's pages.

Let's begin with one of the party's two great goals, one that extends
beyond this bill to other issues like taxes and regulation. That goal is
to make life as easy and pleasant as possible for the wealthy, those
"job creators" whose virtue is proven by the size of their bank accounts.

The Senate's bill gives them a cornucopia of benefits, rolling back the
tax increases that were contained in the Affordable Care Act, to the
tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. One cut, on investment taxes,
would even be made retroactive to the beginning of the year, just to put
something extra in the wealthy's pockets. There are a couple of more
little goodies in there, like the repeal of an ACA provision that
limited the tax deduction for insurance company CEO pay to the first
$500,000. The Republicans who wrote the bill were being very thoughtful.

Then there's Medicaid, the bill's most prominent target for assault. It
also not only eliminates the ACA's expansion of Medicaid, phasing it out
beginning in 2021, but goes much farther. Medicaid would no longer be an
"entitlement," ... Instead, Medicaid would be subject to new,
slow-growing per capita caps, which represents hundreds of billions in
cuts in coming years. In addition, states would be given "flexibility"
over whom they cover, meaning they'd be allowed to reduce benefits or
kick people off the program entirely. And who are the beneficiaries of
Medicaid? The poor, the disabled, and the elderly ...

That's not all. While the bill maintains the basic structure of the ACA
subsidies that allow people not poor enough for Medicaid to be able to
afford insurance, it makes them stingier, reducing the highest income at
which people can receive the subsidies and cutting the subsidies'
amount, so they're pegged to what it would take for you to buy a less
expensive plan with higher deductibles. That's right, higher deductibles
— which everyone hates and Republicans used as a way of attacking the
ACA. This bill encourages them.

The bill also allows states to opt out of the ACA's "essential health
benefits" requirement, meaning insurers would once again be free to
offer cheap plans that cover very little. Ending the EHB requirement
could be a backdoor way of gutting the protection people with
pre-existing conditions now enjoy — if insurers can offer you bare-bones
plans, then the guarantee that you'll be covered for your pre-existing
conditions will cease to mean very much. It also allows states to seek
waivers for the ACA's outlawing of annual and lifetime limits on
coverage, which threatens the security of everyone who has an
employer-provided plan.

So let's review:

- The wealthy get a huge tax break
- Millions of poor and middle-class people lose health coverage altogether
- Medicaid is gutted and hobbled
- Fewer people get insurance subsidies, and those subsidies are smaller

What does it say about the values and priorities of the people who wrote
this bill, and the people who will vote for it? It says that they are
deeply concerned about maximizing the wealth of the wealthy — so
concerned, in fact, that they're willing to take away health coverage
from millions of people in order to provide the wealthy a large tax cut.
It says that they think that poor people have it too easy. It says that
they believe health care is a privilege, not a right — if you can afford
it, good for you, but if you can't, too damn bad. And it says that their
vision of America's health-care future is one that is surpassingly
cruel, where alone among the world's industrialized democracies, we'll
intentionally leave millions of our citizens without health coverage and
allow them to be bankrupted by medical bills.

In trying to defend this monstrosity — and whatever compromise Senate
Republicans can make with their House counterparts, whose bill was even
more vicious — Republicans will say that they share the same goals on
health care as anyone else, a system that is affordable and
comprehensive and protects everyone. Don't believe it for a second.

http://theweek.com/articles/707541/senate-health-bill-scathing-indictment-republican-party