Sweet salt of Kentucky tears

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Where the hell to even begin with healthcare. News is still developing at a breakneck pace and it is 10:15PM EDT as I begin this. By the time I send this, the Senate will likely have voted to repeal Obamacare, with a bill they released to the public literally 10 minutes ago.

How’d we get here?

Well, it started this morning (yesterday morning, by the time you’re reading this) with an INSANE STORY about Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke threatening to jeopardize energy jobs in Alaska if Senator Lisa Murkowski voted against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act:

That was dumb of him:

But that’s like a tier 3 story compared to the rest of the day.

The tl;dr is that the Senate decided to write the “skinny repeal” (the CBO scored an earlier version and found it would leave 16,000,000 people without insurance over a decade) over lunch today in advance of tonight’s vote. I’ve spent longer writing installments of this newsletter than they spent on this.

The idea is that the bill — which everybody acknowledges is atrocious — would be sent to a Senate-House conference, where it would be revised. But that requires taking Paul Ryan’s word for it and let’s just say one shouldn’t even lend Paul Ryan $20 on the promise that he’d pay it back.

No my guy that is exactly how it fucking works
adorable.

So Paul Ryan got on the phone with a number of Senators and promised to take the bill to conference.

But McCain BFF Lindsey Graham, well, pulled a McCain:

Of course we knew where this was going:

So at 10PM, McConnell et al finally posted the content of the bill:

“Health Care Freedom Act”
hey, look. there’s a number I recognize.

EDIT: JUST KIDDING:

Mike Enzi (R-WY) spent an hour talking about Obamacare, denying Democrats the ability to ask even a single question about the bill they’d be voting on imminently:

So after all that, we had about an hour of scrutinizing CSPAN to determine body language and facial expressions before the vote. It got…weird:

Finally, a little after 1AM, Mike Pence (there to theoretically cast the tie-breaking vote) left, signaling good news:

Finally, at 1:30AM:

Four hours after I started this…

-fin-

Today on the Internet

Today on the Internet is an email newsletter that goes beyond the headlines to catch you up on what people have are saying online about the issues of the day.

Today on the Internet

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Today on the Internet

Today on the Internet is an email newsletter that goes beyond the headlines to catch you up on what people have are saying online about the issues of the day.

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