In November, I was on the Senate floor, arguing with a Republican senator over the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.
The senator, Joe Manchin, had written to the House, calling for an immediate vote.
He said he would be voting for the Graham-Cassidy bill because of its support for his constituents, who he said were sicker and dying faster than ever.
As I listened to the senator, I wondered: What does he mean by the GOP’s cancer?
As we walked down the aisle, I heard a familiar refrain: I’ll vote for the bill because it will bring down the cost of health care.
This is a common refrain in the Republican party’s fight against the Affordable Care Act, the law that has transformed health care for millions of Americans and left millions without health insurance coverage.
But it was also a strange refrain: It sounded like a claim that health care was becoming more expensive.
I asked the senator what this meant for his community, what he thought about the GOP strategy of driving up health care costs, what advice he had for Republicans.
“I think it’s a very cynical attempt at trying to sell the bill,” he said.
The Republican Party has a long and complicated history of making the health care crisis worse, in part by failing to address the underlying causes of the crisis, and also by neglecting to address those causes, which are chronic, expensive and preventable.
The GOP’s own analysis of the health crisis was widely cited by conservatives.
In 2015, the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan office of the U.S. government, concluded that the bill would increase the number of Americans who could not afford insurance by nearly 30 million, or 15 million per year.
That would mean a roughly one-in-five-American who could afford insurance would be uninsured by 2024.
And if the bill passed, nearly half of the states would either see the cost for their residents rise by an average of 10 percent or more, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The CBO estimated that in 2020, more than 40 million people would have lost coverage.
This bill would put another 15 million Americans at risk.
This week, I spoke with the chief economist of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which has studied health care in the United States for more than 20 years.
She told me the bill she saw as a potential death sentence for millions was the Republican bill.
“The Senate bill would actually be worse for the ACA than the House bill,” she said.
“In many ways, the Senate bill does not do enough to make it more affordable for people to have coverage.
It does not offer enough protections to those who do not have coverage, it does not make health insurance more affordable.
So it really doesn’t make much sense.
The House bill does do a lot to make health care more affordable, but it does nothing to address a lot of the root causes of that unaffordability, including the lack of access to care.
And the House and Senate bills are not even close on addressing the root cause of that cost: the high cost of drugs.”
The Senate bill will have the opposite effect: It will leave millions uninsured.
The bill would not extend coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
It would not provide the same coverage for people who have insurance but don’t have health care, but the House did.
But the bill is the opposite of the GOP platform.
The party platform calls for expanding health care to cover everyone.
In the House’s version of the bill, it would be easier to get coverage than under the Senate’s.
It also offers more generous tax credits to help pay for insurance.
The Senate’s bill would have more generous subsidies for insurance coverage for the elderly and lower tax rates for the middle class.
It will offer more generous coverage to lower-income Americans.
The Trump administration has already said that the GOP plan would cost more to cover than the ACA.
It is not clear whether the Senate will be able to find a way to reduce the cost.
“This is not a bill that will create more coverage for Americans,” said Jonathan Gruber, the chief scientist of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.
“It’s going to make more people uninsured.”
The Graham-Graham plan has been widely mocked on the right, and it was not always that way.
For years, conservative commentators and media outlets were quick to criticize the GOP for failing to provide a plan that would make health coverage more affordable or secure for its voters.
“There are so many bad ideas out there that the Republican leadership should have been embarrassed by it,” said Mark Levin, a Republican congressman from Michigan and one of the most vocal critics of the Graham bill.
But on Thursday, Graham-Biden had a message for the left.
“For many of you, we’ve been saying we’ve got to make sure the people of this country have access to quality, affordable health care,” Graham said at a press conference.
“We’re going to do it.