Senate Republicans’ hard lesson: No women, no health-care bill
ANALYSIS | Women were notable bookends in Republicans’ inability to pass a health-care bill
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips.
When the health-care saga first started a few months ago, Senate Republican leaders blocked all five GOP women from negotiations for their bill.
On Tuesday, three Republican women sank leaders’ last-ditch effort to do something toward their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Women, in other words, were notable bookends in Republicans’ inability to pass a health-care bill.
After Senate Republicans’ second version of a health-care bill collapsed Monday under the weight of more than a dozen senators (male and female) who had concerns, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decided to just vote on repealing Obamacare without a replacement.
He was daring conservative senators to pull the trigger on something that could leave 32 million more people uninsured over the next decade and blow up the insurance markets.
Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) quickly shut that down.
“I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” Capito tweeted.
In the Senate’s incremental world, three no votes is enough to stop a bill from even getting a chance for a full vote. Republicans’ efforts to unwind Obamacare was dead again, less than 12 hours after it had already died.
And it was Senate Republican women, originally left out of the process, who killed it.
Let’s rewind to explain why the Senate’s five Republican women weren’t originally involved in crafting a health-care bill. Republican leaders have been trying to write a bill that could pass an ideologically divided Senate since May, when House Republicans barely passed a controversial — and largely unpopular — piece of legislation. Senate leadership promptly threw that in the trash.
Instead, Republicans set up a group of about a dozen lawmakers to come up with something more moderate. None of them were women. Republican aides stressed that the group was soon opened to any GOP senator who wanted to participate.
Leaving women out of the negotiations for legislation that affects half the population in a very intimate way was a huge optics blunder for Republicans.
Just last year, Collins had told researchers for a report about women in Congress that as a woman in this nearly all-white-male world, she has to fight harder to get recognized.
“My experience has been, and sadly I think this is still true today, that when a woman is elected to the Senate, she still has to prove that she belongs there, whereas when a man is elected to the Senate, it’s assumed that he belongs here,” she said.
But leaving out women soon turned into a political problem for Republican leaders, too.
McConnell retreated behind closed doors to write the legislation, and soon, even the members of the original working group didn’t know what was in the legislation. They unveiled a bill in June that received immediate skepticism from about a dozen senators, including Collins, Murkowski and Capito.
Republican leaders felt they had no choice but to negotiate the bill in secret to try to find a delicate balance between the party’s conservative and moderate factions, which have very different ideas about government’s role in health care. But in leaving senators out, they also left out their opinions.
Female Republicans’ concerns were much the same as their male colleagues’ concerns about the legislation: It would have cut Medicaid too much. It raised premiums on the elderly and sick. It left rural hospitals without a safety net. Murkowski and Collins said they wouldn’t vote for a bill that defunded women’s health-care through Planned Parenthood.
In the end, it was women who publicly killed it.
If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that when trying to overhaul a major social program, perspectives matter.
