Late Thursday afternoon, CNN announced that it would be holding a town hall debate on Monday billed as “The Fight Over Obamacare.” In one corner we’ll have Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, the architects of the GOP’s most recent legislative effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. In the other, Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar. With Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declaring that he will put Graham-Cassidy to a vote next week, with virtually no debate on the floor of the Senate itself, this town hall will be the most public and dramatic opportunity for the bill’s supporters and opponents to make their respective cases, with the potential to even swing the vote either way.

The Graham-Cassidy bill has been condemned by experts as the “most radical” of all the repeal bills that have been put forth since President Donald Trump took office. It would eliminate Obamacare’s subsidies and Medicaid expansion, replacing them with state-run block grants. Coverage of pre-existing conditions would no longer be guaranteed. To try to convince Alaska’s hold-out Senator Lisa Murkowski, the bill’s sponsors are offering to exempt her state from the effects of the bill. (As Matt Fuller of HuffPost pointed out, the bill is so bad that the bribe is to let states keep the very law it is meant to repeal.) Some 32 million people could lose their health insurance under the bill, as it distributes tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies from mostly blue states like New York and California to mostly red states like Texas.

With so much at stake, the reaction to Monday’s town hall debate has been one of alarm. Democratic aides are privately worrying that Sanders is setting himself up for a trap in which the debate will be framed as “single-payer versus repeal,” following Sanders’s unveiling of a Medicare for All bill last week. (Or, as Republicans will likely call it, “socialism versus capitalism.”) Others see it as a cynical ploy by Sanders, who is allegedly looking out for his own political profile rather than being a team player.

(It took 30 seconds for a Dem aide to text, worrying: "Republicans get to frame it as single payer vs their alternative in prime time.") — Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) September 21, 2017

Dems already worrying this will allow Rs to frame bill as alt to single-payer.



Quiet griping that Sanders jumped gun likely to grow louder. https://t.co/vhPolFkGZx — Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) September 21, 2017

Dem source: "This is exactly the debate Graham & Cassidy want to have. Sanders is looking out for himself rather than being a team player" https://t.co/o8wQ7sZqFN — Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) September 21, 2017

Josh Miller-Lewis, Sanders’s spokesperson, rebuts those claims. He told the New Republic that when CNN approached their team, Sanders jumped on what he saw as an opportunity to “expose Graham-Cassidy as the most egregious and destructive piece of legislation in front of millions of people the week that this bill might come up for a vote.” A potential payoff of this town hall is that it will bring attention to a bill that the GOP has been trying to rush through before a September 30 deadline, after which it will not be able to repeal Obamacare with only a simple majority. As one health care activist told Vox’s Jeff Stein, “I’m still having a really hard time convincing people this is real.”

“We’ve defeated Republican health care, similar bills, so many times, and they’re tired,” Miller-Lewis said of voters. “This is an opportunity to shake things up and get people to pay attention again and understand how bad this bill is.” The town hall will surely shine more daylight on the impending threat of Graham-Cassidy, and this is the best reason for Sanders to accept this debate.