Tweets Document Hypocrisy In GOP's Secret Health Care Reform

As GOP leaders release their plan to replace Obamacare with a bill created with such secrecy that its provisions have remained a mystery even to top White House officials and fellow Republicans, try to guess who is responsible for the following comments:

• Reshaping the American health system is a huge deal, and it should not be done in secret;
• Lawmakers and the public need a reasonable period of time to examine the details of any bill and weigh the costs and benefits;
• Rushing through the reform process does a disservice not only to those who are affected by the legislation but to the democratic process itself.

Chalk up all of those words to Republicans who made them during the weeks and months before Obamacare (formally known as the Affordable Care Act) was passed into law in 2010.

Beginning back then and continuing to this day, GOP leaders have claimed Democrats had shed all decency to concoct Obamacare in secret and pass it before the public knew anything about the plan.

“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, before Christmas," Sen. Mitch McConnell, now the senate majority leader, said at a December 2009 press conference. “And no one will have an opportunity to read it."

Times have changed.

The current Senate bill to overhaul the nation's health care system is scheduled to be revealed today, Thursday, in the form of what McConnell describes as a"discussion draft." Notwithstanding the complexities of health care and the profound impact any new law will have on millions of Americans, senators will have little time to gather expert opinions on the bill and decipher how it would affect their constituents. McConnell wants a vote next week.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which is typically relied on by lawmakers for estimates on the cost and impact of proposed legislation, has not completed its analysis of the Senate draft bill and is not expected to until next week. Until then, senators have no reliable estimate on the plan's impact on insurance costs or how many people would lose their coverage altogether.

McConnell has tried to deflect criticism for the secrecy of the bill and the rush to pass it by claiming Democrats did the same thing to pass Obamacare.

McConnell's claims against Democrats, though, were wrong when he made them almost seven years ago and they're wrong now.

In fact, Obama's Affordable Care Act was scrutinized, debated and amended for more than a year before it was signed into law. Dozens of public hearings on the legislation were held by three House committees and two Senate committees who then sent it to the full Senate, where it was debated on the floor for 25 straight days before a vote.

In contrast, the Senate's current bill has been kept secret from all but the 13 GOP senators McConnell appointed to write it. No public hearings on the bill have been held and none are planned.

Until the budget office's analysis is released, which could be only a day or two before the vote, senators will most likely gauge the bill's impact based on its assessment of the House bill that passed in May. The Senate's legislation was expected to include provisions that mirror those found in the House bill.

The CBO's bill estimated that 23 million more people would join the ranks of the uninsured under the House plan as compared to current law. The analysts further found that Republican claims that the new legislation would protect the middle-aged, the elderly and people with preexisting conditions from sky-rocketing premiums were simply untrue. Many people in those categories would go broke paying wildly increased insurance premiums before being pushed out of the market entirely, the CBO concluded.

Democrats argue that McConnell has kept the GOP plan deeply under wraps because opposition would have grown by the day, as more people became aware of its severity. By keeping the provisions of the plan unknown to his fellow GOP senators, McConnell allowed them to avoid having to defend the bill. They could claim, somewhat legitimately, that they simply had no concrete information to address reports that the bill would include a $1.2 trillion tax cut for select businesses and the wealthiest 2 percent of people in the country, paid for in large part by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicaid.

The Republican strategy to downplay criticism for voting on a bill that has been subject to remarkably little scrutiny while being hugely consequential, has been to claim their actions are the Democrats' fault. Democrats rigged the process to pass Obamacare, the message goes, why shouldn't we play the same game to repeal it?

The strategy is curious not only because the claims about Obamacare's passage are easily disproven but because of the obvious gap between what the GOP said about secrecy seven years and what its actions are now.

Democrats have pointed out Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, for example, who said in 2010, after a year of debate and public hearings on Obamacare:

He has been untroubled by the secret meetings McConnell has ordered.

Vice President Pence, who has been a forceful administration surrogate pushing for repeal of Obamacare, made a similar point — back then:

Republicans need to do what they have to on health care, he now says. Not great for the GOP on the consistency scale, but it gets worse.

Just two months before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, now-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, then a Georgia congressman, argued that "the American people" wanted more information on the bill.

Last week, though, he offered a remarkable admission when asked what he knew about the Senate's current plan for health care reform, making it clear that even he was in the dark.

“I haven’t seen any legislative language,” he replied.

It's not even clear if the president himself is in the loop on the Senate's bill. Asked on Tuesday whether President Trump has seen the bill the Senate is working on, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said he didn't know. Later, the White House said the president had been briefed on the bill's major provisions.

One other big inconsistency in Republican talking points on how their reform bill is being handled:

In 2010, the party's leaders also criticized Democrats for considering passing Obamacare through a process called "reconciliation," which allows legislation to pass the Senate with only 51 votes rather than the usual 60. "An assault on democracy," went the party line before the tactic was even used.

“This use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation, against the will of the American people, would be unprecedented in scope,” warned Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch in a piece published in The Washington Post in December 2010. “The havoc wrought would threaten our system of checks and balances, corrode the legislative process, degrade our system of government and damage the prospects of bipartisanship.”

In fact, Obamacare was not passed through reconciliation. The bill's major provisions, including individual mandates, Medicaid expansion, cost protections for the sick, insurance subsidies and new taxes all were passed with the usual required number of votes, 60. A bill to allow adjustments in subsidies and taxes was later passed through reconciliation.

In any case, Hatch appears to have changed his views about the use of reconciliation to pass health care legislation. He was apparently mistaken in equating it with an "assault on democracy," that would threaten to "corrode the legislative process," and "degrade our system of government."

The Republicans made clear months ago that they intend to use reconciliation to pass the Senate health care bill. Hatch has said nothing about it.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais