This week could be the end of TrumpCare

The Republican effort to overhaul the American healthcare system is on thin ice. The Senate is losing momentum, with murmurs that moderate Republicans are increasingly ready to throw in the towel. With Congress home for a weeklong recess, their constituents have the chance to scare their representatives off from Obamacare repeal for once and for all.

Earlier this month, Republicans in the House of Representatives muscled an egregiously reckless and harmful healthcare bill through to passage. Thanks to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, we now know that the bill that House Republicans blindly approved will take insurance away from 23 million people and cause premiums for senior citizens to jump by as much as 800 percent per year.

The logic behind passing a bill poised to hurt millions of Americans was to shove Obamacare repeal over to the Senate to come up with something better. With President Trump deeply disengaged in the policy details of health reform and the House abdicating its responsibility to draft responsible legislation, it falls to the Senate to be the ultimate decider.

There are signs that the Senate is balking in the face of this responsibility. Even before the CBO report came out, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was struggling to see a path to pass Obamacare repeal, telling reporters on Wednesday, “I don’t know how we get to 50 [votes] at the moment. But that’s the goal.”

Reaching that goal became significantly harder in the wake of the CBO’s gory assessment of the House bill. Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) — one of the most vulnerable Republicans in 2018 — admitted that the brutal math in the House bill “makes everything harder.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said that she couldn’t support a bill as harmful as the House’s. One anonymous Republican senator sowed doubt, saying, “If I had to bet my house, I’d bet we don’t get it done.”

Yet the Senate is hamstrung by the House bill. Because Republicans only have 52 votes in the Senate, they have to shoehorn any Obamacare repeal bill through the budget reconciliation process. As Politico reports, this limits the Senate’s ability to make major changes to the House bill: “Senators cannot write a bill that saves fewer than the $119 billion in savings from the House bill, which could restrict just how much room Republicans have to produce better coverage numbers or lower premiums.”

So the Senate can’t do much to rehabilitate the House’s disastrous bill, unable to spend more money to cover more people and lower premiums without forsaking some of Speaker Paul Ryan’s treasured tax cuts for the rich. This has left some senators looking for a way out. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) floated a deceitful if face-saving off-ramp for the GOP: back out of repeal for the time being while waiting for Obamacare to “explode” on its own. “With today’s news,” Graham tweeted about the CBO report, “the ‘Collapse and Replace’ of Obamacare may prove to be the most effective path forward.” That is, let Obamacare “collapse” now, and then take up replacing it later.

Of course, Obamacare won’t implode on its own. Its individual marketplaces had stabilized — but now they’re being actively sandbagged by malicious policy decisions coming out of the White House. Obamacare provides cost-sharing subsidies to insurers to lower premiums and deductibles for low-income enrollees — but Trump has refused to commit to paying them. The White House has also suggested that it might not enforce the law’s mandate to purchase insurance. Trump is doing what he can to destabilize insurance markets and bring about an Obamacare implosion.

This has caused insurers to raise rates or else back out of Obamacare’s marketplaces altogether. For instance, in North Carolina, the insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield expressly said that it filed to raise premiums by 23 percent next year instead of by just 9 percent because of the White House’s refusal to clarify whether it will pay Obamacare’s insurer subsidies. The CBO also acknowledged that “uncertainty about enforcement of the individual mandate and about future payments of the cost-sharing subsidies” could lead insurers to exit the market.

So Trump and his congressional Republican abettors are sabotaging our healthcare system to grease the wheels for a massive tax cut for the wealthy disguised as health reform. It’s the political equivalent of burning down your house to pocket the insurance money.

If the abysmal public approval ratings of AHCA are any guide, the American people are seeing right through this scam. Just 27 percent of Americans approve of the Republican healthcare bill, compared to 53 percent that now support Obamacare.

So it’s up to an engaged American citizenry to stop Trump and the Republicans’ assault on our healthcare. That means reminding their representatives that the nation’s health hangs in the balance, riding on the judgment of a handful of vulnerable and on-the-fence senators like Heller, Collins, Shelley Moore-Capito (R-W.Va.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), among others.

The GOP’s devastating bill is teetering on the precipice. By making the full power of the resistance felt this week, the American people might just be able to push it over the edge where it belongs.