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From all indications, you're not going to have much chance to react to whatever a group of senators is putting together to erase health coverage for many Americans, "replacing" it with something else or nothing at all.

 the senators have no plans to release legislative details of their health plan anytime soon because "we aren't stupid," according to the news site.

https://twitter.com/jrovner/status/874326602167058434

The current plan is to release it to the Congressional Budget Office and then vote on it before the July 4th recess, when you're probably not going to be paying much attention.

The bill won't even go through the committee process and get a hearing where people and groups, most of whom are likely to be against it, get a chance to speak publicly before the senators.

 reports that even some Republican senators don't know what the Senate leadership is discussing.

If you've watched sports stadium debates over the years, you might recognize the technique. Nothing's ever dead except for people's interest in opposing it.

In the New York Times today, David Leonhart 

calls  the opposition effort "half hearted,"

 which seems to be a half-heart more than the process birthing the legislation.

"Even if they did what are they going say?" a Times commenter correctly points out. "The health care bill in the Senate is bad, but we don't know what's in it."

Medicaid cuts. It's a big part of where the money for tax breaks for wealthier Americans is going to come from.

And it's something you're going to need, David Grabowski, the director of health care policy at Harvard Medical School 

"Medicaid is not 'somebody else’s' insurance," he writes in the op-ed, joined by colleagues at M.I.T. and Brown. "It is insurance for all of our mothers and fathers and, eventually, for ourselves."

That's the sort of question that somebody could ask at a public hearing on Capitol Hill if senators weren't sure the answer -- reality -- might interfere with things.

NewsCut

Bob Collins

Author

If you've watched sports stadium debates over the years, you might recognize the technique. Nothing's ever dead except for people's interest in opposing it.


Whatever happened to that health care bill?

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