Graham-Cassidy Health Care Bill Gets Last-Minute Revision As Support Stalls

With Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., still insisting he won’t back the bill, nabbing two of those three senators is crucial. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said he would not vote for the bill.

Moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who voted against her party’s bill in July, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that it was hard to “envision a scenario where I would end up voting for this bill”. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) – gives states the green light to rewrite the Affordable Care Act’s current requirements that insurers operate a single risk pool.

The Senate bill would cap Medicaid funding and shift an estimated $180 billion dollars away from states like Rhode Island, which expanded their Medicaid programs, to states which did not.

Proponents, on the other hand, advertise the “flexibility” that would come from the passing of this bill.

States would receive more freedom and flexibility to innovate health care policies and lower costs, the senators claimed.

– The bill reshapes a massive and fundamental sector of the economy, including the Medicaid program for the poor and near-poor, but senators will vote on it without a serious Congressional Budget Office projection of its effects on people’s health coverage. This would help reduce the inequality between the states that chose to partake in the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and those that did not. According to the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, this part of the bill would cut Medicaid spending by $175 billion between 2020 and 2026.

Stabenow on Monday said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that she doubts the bill will pass, but that the new version has changed a few provisions, including protections for those with preexisting conditions.

– In a popularity contest with Obamacare, the Cassidy-Graham health-care bill would lose, big time. Medicaid would get the worst of the deal, leaving about 15 million people without access.

Media outlets take a look at how the Graham-Cassidy plan would alter the country’s health care landscape. So the Republicans could afford only two defections at most.

Graham-Cassidy is facing strong criticism from major physician organizations, as well.

The trade group joined with the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Federation of American Hospitals, American Hospital Association, American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians to release a joint statement (PDF) this weekend opposing the bill. All our health-care problems will be solved once we unleash the brain trust that is the Kansas legislature.

Klobuchar, a Democrat, teams up tonight with Vermont independent Sen.

U.S. Senators Lindsay Graham and Bill Cassidy have hardly hidden one big impact of their Obamacare repeal bill: that it punishes California. And they have reason to think so. Now, he said, supporters of the belated Graham-Cassidy bill expect House members to go along with whatever senators pass because the vote would come so close to September 30.

-Fifty-six percent of respondents said they prefer the Affordable Care Act to Cassidy-Graham; 33 percent said they prefer Cassidy-Graham over the ACA.