Republican leaders in the House have been huddling over the last few days in a frantic search for enough votes to win passage of their proposed revision of Obamacare, in the process making an already flawed bill even worse. One measure of their desperation was a cynical last-minute provision that would shift Medicaid costs from New York’s rural and suburban counties to the state government, pleasing upstate Republicans who represent those counties but reducing coverage provided by the state.
Such wheeling and dealing has done nothing to improve a bill that would rip coverage from 24 million people over 10 years, leaving more Americans uninsured than if Congress simply repealed the Affordable Care Act, and inspiring an official of the American College of Physicians, which represents 148,000 doctors and medical students, to say on Monday that he had “never seen a bill that will do more harm to health.”