The dead-eyed ghoul who consigned 17 million people to a fate without health insurance
By 
“Do I like this bill? No.”
NEW: Sen. Lisa Murkowski stares me down for more than 10 secs after I ask her to respond to Sen. Rand Paul’s critique of the deal she struck to get her to a YES and pass the OBBB.
“Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests.”
w/ @frankthorp pic.twitter.com/d8mku7RDct— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) July 1, 2025
This is somebody who knows she has voted for a horrible bill, one that is terrible for most of the country, and also a net negative even for Alaskans. Indeed, she’s already trying to evade responsibility in multiple senses:
“This is a bad bill advanced by a bad process, but what am I, the median vote on the bill, supposed to do about it? Maybe, uh, the House will do something about it?”
Murkowski has plenty of money. She’s 68. She cast a critical no vote on the last round of ACA repeal and did just fine. If she didn’t want to take the pressure anymore she could spend the rest of her life on a lucrative no-work lecture circuit. Instead she wants her legacy to be senselessly sickening and killing and immiserating people because she can make it marginally less bad for her own state, and she’s still trying to convince herself that someone else will fix it. Unspeakably vile.
This — inter many alia — is what she voted for:
The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration spending plan would wipe out many of the strides made by the Affordable Care Act in reducing the number of uninsured Americans, resulting in at least 17 million Americans losing their health coverage, according to nonpartisan estimates and experts.
The bill, which narrowly passed the Senate on Tuesday and now heads back to the House, would effectively accomplish what Republicans have long failed to do: unwind many of the key components of the ACA, President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, which dramatically increased the number of Americans with access to health insurance.
To start, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate version of the bill would result in 11.8 million more uninsured in 2034, mostly because of Medicaid cuts, compared with 10.9 million if the House version became law.
In addition, both versions of the bill would allow pandemic-era enhanced subsidies for health insurance through ACA marketplaces to expire at the end of the year, sharply raising out-of-pocket costs for millions of Americans. The CBO estimates that 4.2 million people would lose insurance as a result. An additional 1 million are likely to become uninsured because of a combination of other Trump administration cuts and the Republican legislation, according to the CBO.
The bill also includes other, less-noticed changes that over several years would make it harder for states to maintain the ACA’s Medicaid expansion at existing levels, which currently cover some 20 million Americans, according to KFF, a health policy research organization.
“This bill — if passed, and if the enhanced subsidies expire — will be a very effective undermining of the vision of the Affordable Care Act to move the United States to a country where universal coverage is in sight,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “This was the 100-year fight to get to the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”
Congratulations to every reporter who suggested that electing Trump would just make in 2019 again, although Republicans were completely clear that they intended to repeal the ACA and the guy who stopped them from doing it last time is dead.