Back in May, Jimmy Kimmel made an impassioned plea, after his newborn’s heart surgery, that Republicans actually work to improve health care in their quest to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, rather than making things worse. This eventually resulted in Senator Bill Cassidy going on Kimmel’s show (and news programs) and saying that any health care bill must pass the “Jimmy Kimmel Test” to garner his support.
Fast forward to now, when his own “Graham-Cassidy” bill is Republicans’ new, last-ditch attempt to repeal the ACA before the September 30th deadline, after which they can no longer slip it through as a “budget reconciliation,” meaning they’d then need 60 votes rather than 51. Basically, they won’t ever be able to jam through a bad, partisan health care bill if they can’t do it before the end of the month, rendering their promises to get rid of “Obamacare” completely failed.
The bill is bad for many reasons, some of which Kimmel lays out above, and some of which directly contradict what Cassidy claimed to envision as the “Jimmy Kimmel Test.” Although, that’s not entirely surprising when some proponents of the bill don’t seem to even understand, fundamentally, how insurance works:
Trump adviser Moore on unfairness of the healthy subsidizing the sick: “people want insurance for their own families, not other peoples’ “
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) September 19, 2017
The entire point of insurance is that everyone who has it covers those who need it, with the understanding that they’d get the same treatment if they suddenly needed it. A system where no one pays for the health care of others would just be no one having health insurance, and only people who could afford to pay full price for their health care coverage would get it. Needless to say, that’s not a workable goal.
If you want to see what Cassidy’s real concern is with the bill, here he is, in his own words, explaining that it’s OK for the Congressional Budget Office not to get a full score on the bill before it’s passed (which they have no time to do), because they’ll at least get a score on its financial aspects:
.@BillCassidy defends considering health care bill with only “preliminary assessment” by CBO, says score will be “on the financial aspect.” pic.twitter.com/RO2BJ1GukU
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 19, 2017
He’s not concerned about knowing what it will do to Americans’ health care, only what it will do for Republicans’ promises of lowering spending on everything that isn’t war. Cassidy has already responded to Kimmel’s segment, claiming that not only will more people have coverage under the new bill (which is fairly certainly false), but there are people who currently struggle with preexisting conditions who will suddenly find health care attainable under the new bill:
Here is Sen Cassidy’s stmt in response to @jimmykimmel‘s opening monologue tonight where he criticizes Graham-Cassidy –> pic.twitter.com/By5tsZSkPt
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) September 20, 2017
No one knows what he’s talking about, since the new bill will almost certainly lead to no change in the way preexisting conditions are handled other than possibly allowing insurance companies to charge more for people who have them. If I had to guess, I’d say he believes the traditional Republican stance that their bill will lower health insurance costs, making it more affordable for some but there’s currently no reason to believe that lines up with reality.
Meanwhile, those who are usually all about states’ rights, especially when it was ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion couldn’t be forced on individual states, are suddenly feeling a bit differently. Senator Lindsey Graham himself admits that the bill as a bit of attempt to create “parity” between red and blue states, when a primary reason for so much disparity is that some of them turned down the Medicaid expansion:
Telling moment from Graham:
Notes CA & NY are “big blue states”
“I’m not out to hurt them—but Im trying to, you know, create parity here”
— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) September 19, 2017
And then there’s Republican Senator John Kennedy, who’s considering adding a provision to bar individual states from using the diminished federal money they’d receive to start their own single-payer system. Basically, states’ rights are only important when they’re used to stop things Republicans don’t want.
(image: ABC)
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