TrumpCare is a Human Rights Catastrophe Being Advanced Through an Undemocratic Process

The Senate version of the AHCA is here, and it’s morally repugnant.

It will probably pass although it has virtually no public constituency, and as Beutler says this will happen in part because the undemocratic process McConnell used played the media like a fiddle:

For the reasons spelled out above, I think this misdiagnoses the source of the challenge and the solution to it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t lock down the bill-writing process in order to block liberals from going over the bill with a fine-tooth comb. His chief insight was in recognizing a bias—not among liberals, but within the news industry—toward what you might call “new news.” Things we didn’t know before, but do know now. It is that bias, more than anything else, that has brought us to the brink of living under a law that almost nobody on the planet has seen but that will uninsure millions to pay for millionaire tax cuts.

And it’s not just the quantity of coverage, either. The Times did run an A1 story on the AHCA, and the results were surely pleasing to the people looking to take insurance away from 23 million people to pay for an upper-class tax cut:

President Trump had urged Republican senators to write a more generous bill than a House version that he first heralded and then called “mean,” but Republican leaders on Tuesday appeared to be drafting legislation that would do even more to slow the growth of Medicaid toward the end of the coming decade.

This is not a neutral way of describing upwards of a trillion dollars and Medicaid cuts. This is just pure, undiluted Republican spin. Holding a vote two days after the release of the CBO score will help obscure the truth, but the media shouldn’t need a new score to tell the public the truth.

I have to say, it sure is weird how much federal spending for the poor and federal consumer regulation you eliminate when you repeal a neoliberal bailout of the health insurance industry.