EDITORIAL: Expose stealth Trumpcare law to sunshine | Editorial

June 19--Seldom if ever has Congress spawned anything as grossly unpopular as the American Health Care Act, the bill to repeal Obamacare. National polls show just 29 percent of people approve of it. Every state is against it. For Sen. Marco Rubio's information, 48 percent of Floridians oppose it, compared to 35 in support.

Even Donald Trump seems to get the message. "We want to boast about this plan," he declared barely a month ago during a Rose Garden celebration with the House Republicans who had just passed it. He was pleased to hear it called Trumpcare. Now he calls it "mean" and asks the Senate to "improve" it.

But the House bill is too wrong in every respect to possibly be made right. How the Senate leadership is handling it speaks of bad intentions, not good ones.

The Senate amendment is being drafted in secret by 12 male Republican senators. No committee will see it or hold public hearings before it goes to the floor. Whether any amendments will be entertained is in doubt. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's reportedly wants to ram it through before the July 4 recess. He claims to be too busy to meet with the many public health organizations that oppose it.

McConnell fears the more the American people see what the Senate is cooking up, the more they will detest it, too. He is right.

"Opening it to scrutiny before a vote," remarked a New York Times editorial, "would be the congressional equivalent of exposing a vampire to sunlight."

The analogy is apt.

The House bill would take health insurance from some 24 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This includes an estimated 5 million people between the ages of 50 and 64, a particularly vulnerable group.

The financial security of many millions more would be at risk from higher premiums for older Americans, from annual and lifetime limits on insurance benefits, and from allowing insurers to again bar people who have pre-existing conditions or gouge them with exorbitant premiums.

Even Medicare is at risk. Trumpcare is not simply about the lethal ambition to erase former President Barack Obama's signature achievement. Mainly, it's the key to fulfilling the Republican obsession to cut taxes for the wealthy, by as much as $1 trillion over 10 years. That will require staggering cuts in Medicaid and the repeal of Obamacare taxes earmarked for Medicare. These include a surtax on high-income earners and a levy on medical supply companies. Without these, Medicare's actuaries say, the system's Part A trust fund would be exhausted by 2026, two years earlier than under current law.

That trust fund pays for hospital stays, skilled nursing facilities, home health visits and hospice care. When it is gone, the government will either have to reduce benefits or raise taxes.

Trumpcare also aims at imposing per capita limits on Medicaid, which has implications for Medicare as well. One in five Medicare enrollees also receives Medicaid for help with Part B premiums, nursing home care and disability services. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicaid subsidizes two out of three Medicare recipients in nursing homes.

The Republicans claim that Obamacare is a "job killer," but it is their bill that fits the description. According to a new estimate, it would eliminate a million jobs, mainly in health care, reduce business revenue by $148 billion and likely bring on a recession.

Congress normally marks up complex legislation after extensive public hearings and prolonged floor debate follows. None of that occurred in the House and none is planned in the Senate's secret scheme. The few GOP moderates whose votes could sink the bill are privately being courted with small concessions for their states. To call the procedure outrageous would be an understatement. Obamacare passed in 2009 after 25 days of Senate floor debate. There was nothing stealthy about it.

There was a point, though, where McConnell claimed that Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader then, was resolving too much in private. This is what McConnell said: "This massive piece of legislation that seeks to restructure one sixth of our economy is being written behind closed doors without input from anyone, in an effort to jam it past not only the Senate, but the American people."

That was an exaggeration, but it precisely describes what McConnell is doing today as majority leader.

Moreover, he expects Trump to sign whatever the Congress sends him, no matter how bad it is. The president's unpopularity puts him at the mercy of his only enablers, the Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Marco Rubio, Florida's junior senator, has been one of those enablers. But he cannot support anything resembling the House bill, or what is rumored to be in the Senate bill, without harming his constituents.

So it was welcome news Sunday to hear him say secrecy is not the way to go.

"The Senate is not a place where you can just cook up something behind closed doors and rush it for a vote on the floor, especially on an issue like this," Rubio said in a "Face the Nation" interview.

Rubio, you might recall, has refused to hold town hall meetings -- or meet with constituents at his office -- to discuss health care.

It's welcome news that Rubio is objecting to McConnell's stealthy process, but his objections should not end there.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O'Hara, Andrew Abramson, Elana Simms, Gary Stein and Editor-in-Chief Howard Saltz.

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