CBO: Senate Bill Is Hot Trash

As I mentioned earlier, the Congressional Budget Office announced it was anticipating releasing its assessment of the Senate "healthcare" bill this afternoon, and so it has. And I hope you're reclining comfortably on your fainting couches so you don't swoon with the shock of hearing that the CBO has concluded that the Senate bill is hot trash, just like the House version. I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly.

Amy Goldstein and Kelsey Snell at the Washington Post: CBO: Senate GOP Healthcare Bill Would Leave 22 Million More People Uninsured by 2026.

Senate Republicans' bill to erase major parts of the Affordable Care Act would cause an estimated 22 million more Americans to be uninsured in the coming decade — just over a million fewer than similar legislation recently passed by the House, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

...According to the 49-page report, the immediate increase in the ranks of the uninsured would be slightly larger than under the House version, with an estimated 15 million fewer Americans likely to have coverage in 2018, compared to 14 million in the House bill.

Twenty-two million people would lose health insurance coverage, fifteen million of them by next year.

There is a lot more to the CBO report, of course, but do you even need to know more than that? It's scandalous.

I am despondent at the fact that there are people tasked with governing this country and representing the people's interests who can look at those figures and still justify supporting this legislation. It is an unfathomable cruelty that the United States continues to treat healthcare as a privilege, rather than a right.