The Senate GOP Healthcare Bill Is Vile Garbage

Senate Republicans have made public the text of their version of Trumpcare, and it is one of the most obscene pieces of legislation on which I've ever laid eyes. The long and the short of it is this: Senate Republicans have proposed absolutely annihilating Medicaid to pay for a massive tax cut for the super wealthy.

Andy Slavitt, who managed Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act for President Obama, provided an analysis of the details in a Twitter thread:

Point 1: The ACA is not repealed. Health care for poor people, kids, the disability community, and seniors is. The ACA income-based tax credits stay—due to Senate rules. They just get bulldozed. More accurately, the people receiving the help do. What's a conservative to do? They hate the tax credits. But they do demolish what an insurance company needs to do. Which they love.

Older people will be charged much more. People over 350% of poverty [line] won't get any support. Insurance will only cover 58% of someone's needs. Millions of families lose coverage. Those with insurance will get a lot less. Maternity, mental health, cancer treatments—not required. Insurers won't cover expensive HIV and cancer meds if they are the only ones. Coverage will devolve. That's the point, not a side effect.

Point 2: The main event in the Senate bill is the destruction of Medicaid. Far, far worse than even the House bill. Eligibility for exchanges would begin at 0% of FPL. This means states could eliminate Medicaid and put people in the exchange with no help.

Medicaid's cuts of 25% in the House increase much more in the Senate. Hundreds of billions more cuts. Medicaid cuts spike further in 2025. The year baby boomers turn 80. And Medicaid pays half of nursing home care in the country. This bill is awful for anyone planning on aging. Age tax, nursing home cuts, robbing Medicare Trust Fund. For seniors, this bill is the opposite of our commitment to Americans as they age or get ill.

The Senate bill hurts kids by putting a capped price tag on their lives too.

Point 3: There is one sacrosanct part of the bill. The giant tax cuts for wealthy, insurers, pharma, and other corporations are intact.

It is quite genuinely not hyperbole to say that this is the absolute opposite of a healthcare bill. It is a death sentence for the most vulnerable citizens of this nation, whose very lives Republicans believe are an acceptable cost to make wealthy people and corporations even wealthier.

This is utterly vile. A six-year-old child traveled to D.C. to literally beg for healthcare, and Senate Republicans wrote a bill that would condemn children to miserable, painful, unnecessary deaths. I cannot find the words to adequately convey the profundity of my grief-suffused rage for the architects of this despicable, abusive bill.

Call your senators today and tell them, if they are Democrats, to fight this bill with everything they've got, and, if they are Republicans, that if they vote in favor of this disgusting legislation, you will fight their reelection with everything you've got.

This bill is beyond "mean." It is a precipitous escalation in the class warfare the Republican Party has been waging for decades. It is the work of a party whose breathtaking avarice is matched only by their malignant cruelty. It is anti-life.

I am not surprised by the horror Senate Republicans have crafted in secrecy and haste. I know them far too well for astonishment. But I am incandescently angry. At their greed. At their enmity. At their intolerable delight and pride in harming the very people whose interests they were elected to protect.

What loathsome wrecks of humanity the members of this detestable party have become. The quintessence of malice.