Obamacare repeal: Graham-Cassidy health care bill gains traction

The latest Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act died in the Senate on Tuesday. But the party’s effort to repeal the law remains very much alive.

As long as the GOP controls Congress, they’ll keep trying.

Senate Republicans have admitted defeat on Obamacare repeal — again.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced Tuesday afternoon that he will not bring the Graham-Cassidy bill — the latest GOP repeal bill, which had gained steam this month — to a vote this week.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said Monday she opposes the Graham-Cassidy bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, likely the final blow to the legislation unless one of its opponents unexpectedly changes his or her mind.

Collins joins Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rand Paul (R-KY) in opposing the bill. Because 50 of the 52 Senate Republicans must support Graham-Cassidy for it to pass, those three votes would be enough to kill it.

The Graham-Cassidy plan to repeal and replace Obamacare would reduce the federal deficit by at least $133 billion, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Monday afternoon, after reviewing a recent not final version of the bill.

While the office couldn’t specify a number, it also said that the bill would likely lead to millions fewer Americans having health insurance when compared with current law.

The health care bill sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was already the most sweeping of any Obamacare repeal effort in its restrictions on reproductive health coverage. A new version released on Sunday night would go even further than its predecessor in rolling back protections that have allowed millions of Americans to get affordable birth control.

This version would give states even more leeway to bypass the requirements of Obamacare — including those that guarantee coverage for contraception. In so doing, it may please conservatives who want states to have greater say over what is covered, and those who have opposed the contraceptive requirements from the beginning. But it will also threaten a benefit on which many people rely to maintain their health and plan their families.

More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Monday morning to oppose Senate Republicans’ Graham-Cassidy health care bill.

The bill would sharply reduce spending for Medicaid by billions of dollars by tying it to medical inflation, blow up Obamacare’s marketplaces, and open the door for states to curtail protections for patients with preexisting conditions.

Senate Republicans, seemingly short on votes for their last-ditch plan to repeal Obamacare, are desperately tweaking the bill in hopes of winning over both their moderate and conservative wings.

The result is a plan from Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-SC) that would go even further in rolling back Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions, while adding hundreds of millions of dollars meant to sweeten the deal for senators from key states.

Senate Republicans are trying yet again to repeal Obamacare, despite seemingly having all the political and substantive reasons in the world not to.

Like all the other bills, the newest one, sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, is horrendously unpopular, with only 24 percent support. The rushed and slipshod process around the bill means its consequences still aren’t well understood, but it’s clear enough that tens of millions of people would likely lose coverage if it passes, that several states represented by Republican senators would lose billions of dollars in federal funding, and that the bill badly violates President Trump’s campaign promise not to cut Medicaid.

Key Republican senators voiced doubts over the latest Obamacare repeal bill, narrowing its chances of passage before a looming September 30 deadline.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins told CNN that “it’s very difficult for me to envision a scenario where I would end up voting for this bill.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Sunday morning that “right now, they don’t have my vote.”

This is the web version of VoxCare, a daily newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Like what you’re reading? Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox here.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) announced Friday he would oppose the latest Obamacare repeal bill, a potential death blow to the GOP’s last hope of undoing much of the 2010 health care law.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) announced Friday he would oppose the latest Obamacare repeal bill, a potential death blow to the GOP’s last hope of undoing much of the 2010 health care law.

McCain said in a statement he “cannot in good conscience” support the bill from Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), which would turn much of Obamacare’s funding into a block grant for the states starting in 2020.

Senate Republicans have scheduled a vote this coming week for their latest Obamacare repeal bill, but all Fox News can talk about is single-payer health care.

We started to see this a few days after Sen. Bernie Sanders released his single-payer plan, which was also the early stages of the GOP pushing to pass yet another Obamacare repeal bill — this time, Graham-Cassidy.

The latest Obamacare repeal bill would result in 21 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 2026, compared to Obamacare, according to a new analysis that seeks to approximate the Congressional Budget Office’s methods.

These estimates from the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy project:

Senate Republicans are teeing up what appears to be one final vote on Obamacare repeal next week.

Notably, health care groups — from the American Medical Association to health insurance companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield — are beginning to release statements about the bill sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-SC).

With their deadline fast approaching, Senate Republicans’ rush to repeal and replace Obamacare remains as unpopular as ever with the public.

Only 24 percent of Americans support Graham-Cassidy, the health care bill Republicans are furiously whipping to pass ahead of September 30, according to a new poll released Thursday by Public Policy Polling. The poll is the first to date of the proposed legislation, which would cripple Obamacare’s exchanges and sharply cut long-term Medicaid spending while also taking billions of funding from blue states that implemented Obamacare and giving it to red ones that did not.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t letting up on Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and his plan to repeal Obamacare.

On Thursday, the late-night host gave his third monologue in three nights attacking the Louisiana senator, who’d appeared on his show months earlier and promised that any bill he’d support would have to protect people with preexisting conditions (including Kimmel’s son, who was born prematurely and required significant medical care).

Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t want to be talking about health care so much, but here he is, smack dab in the middle of a debate he very obviously hates.

On September 20, during his monologue, Kimmel took a breath in the middle of trying to explain the ramshackle Graham-Cassidy health care bill currently up for consideration in the Senate, and looked out at his audience. “Listen: Health care is complicated,” he said. “It’s boring. I don’t want to talk about it. The details are confusing — and that’s what these guys are relying on. They’re counting on you to be so overwhelmed with all the information [that] you just trust them to take care of it. Well, they’re not taking care of you. They’re taking care of the people who give them money.”

The eleventh-hour Obamacare repeal bill sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) would reduce Americans’ access to reproductive health care in a number of ways. But one particular provision would take effect fast, and could plunge patients, insurers, and state governments into chaos.

Starting in 2018, the bill would bar the use of Obamacare’s premium tax credits to pay for plans that include coverage for abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the mother’s life, as health care analyst Charles Gaba notes at ACASignups.net. This would mean no plan offered on the exchanges could cover abortion. This is a problem in itself, as a lack of insurance coverage for abortion can cause a number of problems for patients, such as forcing them to choose between paying for the procedure and paying rent.

In the mad dash to put the latest Obamacare repeal plan on the Senate floor for a vote, the bill will have to pass a critical test to make sure its provisions are actually permissible under the Senate’s arcane and complex rules.

It’s a test that some parts of every repeal plan so far have failed, reshaping the legislation in ways its authors didn’t intend. The new bill from Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) could fail the test too, as a core provision of their plan faces a murky future.

Despite the efforts of Sens. Lindsay Graham and Bill Cassidy to dismiss raising alarm over their new health care bill, Jimmy Kimmel isn’t backing down — and this time it’s personal.

One night after blasting Cassidy for lying “right to my face,” Kimmel doubled down with a second rage-filled monologue about health care, the Graham-Cassidy bill specifically, and anyone who’s criticized him for speaking out on the issue.

Senate Republicans are once again just a few votes away from repealing and replacing Obamacare. It’s a plan that senators themselves struggle to explain and defend and that emerged on the public stage mere days before an expected vote.

How have they found themselves here again, after their previous repeal bills failed in July? The underlying truth, the beating heart of Obamacare repeal that refuses to let it die, is: Republicans just want to pass a bill, any bill, to say they repealed Obamacare. Whatever standards they’ve set for their health care plan, whatever promises they made before, don’t matter.

Obamacare repeal was dead — until it wasn’t.

On the September 20 episode of The Weeds, Sarah Kliff and Ezra Klein discuss the latest Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, the Graham-Cassidy bill, which Sarah calls the “most radical of all the GOP health care bills.”

If you ask Republican senators what they like about Graham-Cassidy, the latest GOP effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, they’ll come back again and again to one talking point: It returns power to the states.

“As a general rule the states do things better than the federal government does,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told my colleague Jeff Stein when asked what substantive problems the bill is meant to solve. “It lets states innovate and adopt creative solutions to local problems,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) elaborated.

The latest Obamacare repeal plan, known as Graham-Cassidy after the senators who proposed it, fundamentally does two big things: It cuts federal funding for health insurance, versus Obamacare, and takes money from the states that best implemented the Affordable Care Act and gives it to the states that obstructed the law.

A new analysis from Avalere Health, an independent consulting firm, just put a price tag on those cuts: $215 billion from 2020 to 2026, when the bill’s funding expires. Stretched out to 2036, if the spending isn’t reauthorized, the cuts are nearly $4 trillion versus current law.

The Republican effort to repeal Obamacare may be back from the dead, as the party makes one last attempt to get a bill through the Senate before an effective deadline of September 30.

Currently, the GOP still appears to be short of the 50 of 52 Senate votes from their own party they need to succeed (assuming all Democrats vote no). The state of play as of Wednesday midday is: