Senate health bill hazardous to America Mitch McConnell's plan makes Congress the true death panel: Our view

The Editorial Board | USA TODAY

After weeks of secret negotiations, Senate Republicans on Thursday took the wraps off their plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. It deserves the old surgeon general's warning about cigarettes: This product may be hazardous to your health.

Like its House counterpart, the Senate plan would end insurance coverage for millions of people, probably tens of millions. It's hard to know for sure, because the plan has yet to be evaluated by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

And like its House counterpart, the Senate measure was drafted without so much as a public hearing. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., intends to rush the plan to a vote in just one week.

The haste is purely political. With the House bill wildly unpopular (earning just 16% support in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday), McConnell doesn’t want his "discussion draft" to languish in the public eye like a dead fish in the midday sun.

He knows all too well what that would entail. When Obamacare was being debated at length in 2009, Republican attack ads made all manner of scurrilous claims, most famously that it would lead to “death panels” deciding when to end care for terminally ill patients.

OPPOSING VIEW

With the Senate bill, no scurrilous scare tactics are necessary. The facts are frightening enough. The plan would slash Medicaid, a program that covers 20% of Americans, nearly half of newborn deliveries and two-thirds of people in nursing homes.

By terminating a requirement that Americans have insurance coverage, the plan would unravel Obamacare's system of private exchanges to sell coverage to individuals. By permitting states to end coverage for such things as maternity care and emergency services, it is downright cruel.

In many ways, the GOP measure is a tax cut masquerading as a health care plan. Republicans are determined to end Obamacare’s taxes, most notably one on the investment income of families making more than $250,000. Over a decade, that takes hundreds of billions of dollars away from health care, leaving lower-income people with lousier coverage at higher prices.

In some ways, the Senate plan is marginally better than the one that squeaked through the House last month, as it would at least continue subsidies to help low-income Americans buy private insurance. But its treatment of Medicaid is as bad, if not worse.

It also appears to be drafted in a way that would allow swing-state Republicans, such as Rob Portman of Ohio, to offer amendments that would give them political cover. A flurry of last minutes changes will make it even harder to gauge the plan's true impact.

The Senate measure is mean in ways that are abundantly clear, and havoc-wreaking in ways that are not. Trying to ram it through, before those impacts become clear for all to see, is no way to deal with life-and-death issues and a big chunk of the American economy.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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