Judge Nap stands with Rand against Graham-Cassidy Obamacare bill

[Matt Collins]

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/5581976021001/?#sp=show-clips

[timosman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAK9xbK0K00

[TheTexan]

He's just letting perfect be the enemy of the great.

[The Rebel Poet]

He's just letting perfect be the enemy of the great.

Negrep for saying trumpcare isn't perfect.

[jllundqu]

Rand Paul must be under tremendous pressure. Susan Collins just came out as a No, along with McCain. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are in the hot seat.

What's the consensus around here on the GrahamCassidy bill?

[specsaregood]

Rand Paul must be under tremendous pressure. Susan Collins just came out as a No, along with McCain. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are in the hot seat.

What's the consensus around here on the GrahamCassidy bill?

Graham is the main sponsor, shouldn't that spell it out for you well enough?

[Zippyjuan]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/21/16339524/republicans-obamacare-repeal-graham-cassidy-nobody-cares


Republicans aren’t voting for Graham-Cassidy. They’re just voting for Obamacare repeal

“Apparently no one cares what the bill actually does."

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heart of Obamacare repeal that refuses to let it die, is: Republicans just want to pass a bill, any bill, to say they repealed Obamacare.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.

The policy is, in a very real sense, beside the point. Republican senators will tell you that themselves, in their own way.

“If we bring this up on the floor, I think every Republican senator is in play because every Republican senator will be faced with that binary choice,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told reporters. “Okay, maybe this isn’t everything they want, but the binary choice is: 100 percent guarantee that Obamacare remains in place, and we may have a path to single-payer, versus this choice of federalism, where we start putting the states back in charge.”




If you transport yourself back to the summer, there were two issues on which a critical mass of Republican senators were unwilling to bend: They refused to back deep cuts to Medicaid, at least not without a softer landing and a viable alternative for covering the program’s current beneficiaries than the GOP’s bills provided; and they would not roll back Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions.

Graham-Cassidy, when you cut through the spin, would do both.


It doesn’t matter which bill it is. I asked an aide to one Republican senator this week whether senators actually liked Graham-Cassidy or whether it was simply the last train leaving the Obamacare repeal station.

“Last train,” the aide said.

Republicans will be remarkably transparent about this, if you ask them.

“This is not the best possible bill — this is the best bill possible under the circumstances,” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) told Vox’s Jeff Stein. “Look, we’re in the back seat of a convertible being driven by Thelma and Louise, and we’re headed toward the canyon. ... So we have to get out of the car, and you have to have a car to get into, and this is the only car there is.”

Grassley was even more blunt.

“You know, I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered,” he told local reporters this week. “But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill.”