It’s Do or Die Time on Trumpcare – Literally

The Senate will vote to strip health care from millions in about 48 hours. This is not a drill.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted to proceed to debate on their taxcuts-for-billionaires “healthcare” bill. Does that mean they’ll release a bill on which to have public hearings and town halls? Nope. In Senate parliamentary language, that means they’ve started the process to vote on the bill this week.

What are they voting on, you ask? TBD, because  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell still hasn’t told anyone what is in bill. Will pregnancy be a pre-existing condition again? Unclear! Will they defund Planned Parenthood? Great question! Will they trigger an utterly preventable insurance death spiral that causes insurance premiums to skyrocket for all of us? Would be good to know!

But we do know that every single plan on the table is an unmitigated disaster: every version proposed thus far would cause at least 20 million people to lose their health insurance, and most versions are even worse. Every Senate version we’ve seen includes sickening cuts to Medicaid. Republican Senators should never be allowed to call themselves “pro-life” again.

So what comes next? Vox has a helpful explainer outlining the byzentine floor time rules, points of order, and vote-o-ramas that come next – and what it boils down to is that we have at most a few days before the Senate votes on whether or not to make maternity coverage inaccessible and to shred Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the 0.01%.

So here’s what we’re going to do in those few days. We’re going to make clear to every Republican Senator in the country that a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act will end their careers. The numbers are on our side:

• Trumpcare would uninsure 122,500 Nevada residents and throw 29,800 kids off Medicaid. Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) won his last race by 11,500 votes.
• About 564,000 West Virginians are on Medicaid, which Trumpcare aims to dismantle. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) won her last race by just 124,700 votes.
• A March poll found that when voters found out their Representative supported the House version of Trumpcare, their support for that Rep. dropped by 30 points. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is up in 2018, and he won his last election by 3 points.

Live in a red state? Here’s a roundup of protests and what to say when you call your Senators to beg for your life, via Indivisible.

Live in a blue state? Indivisible has a brand new calling tool – where you call people living in Nevada or West Virginia, the home states of the Republicans most likely to flip.

Right now, two Republican Senators – Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins – are NOs. We just need one more person to understand that they’ll lose their job if they vote yes.

Making calls? Tweet @feministing and tell us how it goes!

Header Image via Vogue