Get ready for a lot more town hall protests against the Republican replacement for the Affordable Care Act now that it has passed the House. One that's going viral now comes from Rep. Raul Labrador, a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus. It's from his town hall meeting in Idaho yesterday, but it's circulating on social media today.
Watch how the crowd erupts when he says, "Nobody dies because they don't have access to health care."
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The House bill's treatment of pre-existing conditions is also drawing emotional objections from constituents. Rep. Tom Reed was confronted at a town hall today by an audience member who was worried because he had donated a kidney, ABC News reports: ""Now that I have a pre-existing condition, my cost of health care could go up significantly or I could lose health care."
With POTUS' first big legislative success, Trumpland is decamping to New Jersey for the weekend. (His reasoning: it's less expensive than New York!) But with the House finally passing AHCA, you might have missed some of the other big hits of the week. Catch up and relax — there are no civil wars in Trumpland.
Back in March — the first time the GOP tried, and failed, to pass the American Health Care Act — we read all of the "insider" stories and compiled them into a handy chronological list. We're doing it again now that the health care bill has passed in the House, this time with the juicy bits from the Washington Post, Politico, New York Times,Vox, and others.
Michael Dowling, CEO of Northwell Health, a $10 billion not-for-profit hospital system in New York, is not a fan of the Republican health care bill or how it was passed in the House. President Trump and House Republicans ran a victory lap Thursday after the party-line vote, but Dowling said the bill was "far from a success" as it heads to the Senate.
"I would hope the Senate would be more intelligent in how they go about doing it," Dowling told me. "I don't see in any way how this (bill) improves access to care. I think it will do the very opposite."
Senate Republicans will have to mediate the same tensions between conservatives and moderates as the House did when it passed its health care legislation. Starting from scratch, it could take the Senate weeks to put their version together.
