One Week Out: Republicans Are “Coming After Your Health Care”

Republican Senate candidates have relied on dishonest campaign ads and outright lies about their health care records – but they are still “coming after your health care.” Even Mitch McConnell admitted both repeal, as well as Social Security and Medicare cuts, are on the horizon – a threat to programs popular with voters that dragged down GOP candidates in races across the country.

WATCH: MSNBC: Republican Senate Candidates Lie About Health Care Records

MELBER: Take the Republican Senate Candidate in Missouri Josh Hawley. He is literally part of that conservative legal to gut Obamacare in the courts…but his ads running this cycle go in opposite direction touting protections for patients a far cry from how he sounded when Obama was president.
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We’re seeing this trend all over the country, look at a Republican in a swing state, Dean Heller in Nevada. He had said he was against repealing Obama care but that changed after a threat from Trump. Trump was right, Heller would vote for the repeal bill and now he’s back touting parts of Obamacare in new campaign ads.
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Now take Arizona Congresswoman Martha McSally, running for Senate. Last month she said Congress has to move away from Obamacare. Now as Election Day gets closer, as she spends time with voters, take a look: “We do have the opportunity to move forward from the disastrous Obamacare…We gotta get this done… Can we please talk about the things that matter to most voters?”

HuffPost: Believe Republicans When They Say They’re Coming After Your Health Care

• Republicans have been very busy lying about health care: lying about their policy agenda, lying about Democrats calling them liars and lying about who said who was really lying about all this.
• Amid those lies, however, GOP officials and candidates have occasionally lapsed and told the truth: The party, like it always has, wants to cut federal health care programs. They want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, still without having any idea how to replace it, and they’re working hard to make the law worse in the meantime. They want to slash Medicaid. They want to shrink Medicare.
• Beyond the provisions on pre-existing conditions, if Republicans keep control of Congress next year, they will come for the Affordable Care Act again. But they still don’t have a replacement plan that would protect people with pre-existing conditions or do any of the other things the Affordable Care Act did to slash the rate of uninsured Americans.
• Here’s McConnell again, from a Reuters interview: “If we had the votes to completely start over, we’d do it. But that depends on what happens in a couple weeks.”
• “It’s very disturbing and it’s driven by the three big entitlement programs that are very popular ― Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid,” McConnell told Bloomberg TV. “Hopefully at some point here we’ll get serious about this,” he said. McConnell went on to lament that it was a shame Obama and Congress weren’t able to figure out how to ruin these programs together and bizarrely asserted that total GOP control of the federal government somehow made this more difficult.

Wall Street Journal: Health Care Politics Hounds Some GOP Candidates

• In a national poll the Wall Street Journal and NBC News conducted in October, health-care was the second most important issue among voters, trailing only the economy. Forty-five percent of respondents said they thought Democrats would do the best job on health-care policy, while only 27% said Republicans would.
• Perhaps no Republican candidates have been more affected by the changing politics of the health-care law than the state attorneys general running in two of this year’s most critical Senate races: Josh Hawley, who is running against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri, and Patrick Morrissey, who is running in West Virginia against Sen. Joe Manchin.
• As attorneys general, Messrs. Hawley and Morrissey joined a group of 20 states in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the ACA. The suit, filed in federal court in Texas in February, argues that the constitutional basis for the law evaporated when Republicans repealed the individual mandate portion of the law.
• That legal effort has dogged both Mr. Hawley and Mr. Morrissey throughout their campaigns. The two men have insisted that they support protecting pre-existing conditions—even as they participate in a lawsuit that would end those protections—and have called for the passage of a new law to do so.

Texas Observer: We Support Pre-Existing Condition Protections, Say Republicans Who’ve Repeatedly Tried to Eliminate Them

• “Everyone agrees we’re going to protect pre-existing conditions,” Senator Ted Cruz said in a debate this month. Yes, the same Ted Cruz who forced a federal government shutdown in 2013 to try to defund the Affordable Care Act, including pre-existing conditions protections. The same Ted Cruz who has introduced measures weakening those protections and voiced support for a Texas lawsuit to eliminate them.
• Republicans in Texas and around the country are trying to lie their way out of a problem: The ACA’s pre-existing conditions protections are extremely popular and remain a dominant campaign issue with one week to go before the midterm elections.
• But many Republicans now in competitive races have spent years fighting these protections as part of their vendetta against the federal health care law and President Barack Obama. Now, they’re trying to erase that history — even going so far as to claim to be the crusaders for these protections, while actively suing over or railing against the law that created them.

Arizona Republic: Rep. Martha McSally: ‘I’m getting my ass kicked’ on vote to repeal ‘Obamacare’

• Soon after she assumed office to represent Arizona’s Tucson-based district in the House of Representatives, Martha McSally voted for a Republican-backed measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
• McSally’s “aye” vote for H.R. 596 was recorded on the evening of Feb. 3, 2015, and came as her party was intent on undoing, tweaking or rolling back the controversial 2010 health care law implemented by President Barack Obama and Democrats. A year later, McSally voted again to repeal the law.
• And in May 2017, McSally voted for the GOP’s American Health Care Act, which revived their hopes of repealing central portions of the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as “Obamacare.” That legislation, if passed, would have reduced the federal deficit but resulted in 23 million more uninsured Americans through 2026, a Congressional Budget Office analysis found.
• McSally was asked if she would vote again to repeal the health-care law on conservative commentator Sean Hannity’s radio show.  “Well, Sean, I did vote to repeal and replace Obamacare on that House bill — I’m getting my ass kicked for it right now…”

National Journal: Heitkamp, Cramer Talk Health Care in Final Debate

• “[T]he two exchanged barbs over health care, with Heitkamp accusing Cramer of not supporting protections for pre-existing medical conditions, citing his support for an ‘irresponsible’ lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act. She said the litigation, to which the state of North Dakota is a party, would ‘wipe out’ the law and its more popular provisions.”
• Heitkamp: “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. My history is trying to fix the Affordable Care Act. His history is trying to repeal it without a replacement.”

 

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