Senate Republicans Don't Give a Damn About Your Health
‘ROOT AND BRANCH’
Senate Republicans Don’t Give a Damn About Your Health
Is there even a single prominent instance when conservatives have supported broadening access to health care for American citizens?
MICHAEL TOMASKY
06.30.17 1:00 AM ET
So a new Republican Senate health bill might land today. Or it might take a little while longer. They’re considering… things. They might even scale back the tax cuts.
Whatever. Since we’re headed into a short recess here, when they’re all going home to not hold town hall meetings for a bill with 12 percent support, let’s take a step back and assess. Whatever Republicans try to do to this bill will be for two reasons and two reasons only: one, to get it some more votes; and two, to finagle it a better Congressional Budget Office score. Because there’s a number at which their cruelty sounds not quite as cruel as people expect of them. If “only” 16 million are kicked off insurance in the new version, it will be hailed as moderate.
But we can be sure that none of the changes Senate Republicans are about to make will be for the purpose of ensuring that Americans have better health care. God forbid that. They don’t want that. Giving people better health care isn’t why they’re doing this. If you look back over the history of this country, I don’t think you can find a single prominent instance when conservatives have supported broadening access to health care for American citizens. A lot of Republicans—nearly half in both the Senate and the House—voted to create Medicare and Medicaid back in 1965, but that was when the GOP still had liberals. The conservatives were all against it.
Eight years later, Congress passed a big bill creating Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs). They have developed a mixed track record over the years, HMOs, but at the time, it was a Ted Kennedy bill that was designed to give consumers greater choice. This passed the Senate 69-25 in May 1973, and the 25, sure enough, were all conservatives—Bob Dole, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and the like (a few were Southern Democrats, still). Two decades after that we had Hillarycare, which Dole said he would filibuster—a semi-shocking deployment of that tactic at that time—and that effort was killed off.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/senate-republicans-dont-give-a-damn-about-your-health
