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Democrats Blast GOP Senate Health Bill As Tax Cut For The Rich

The Baker Administration has analyzed how the health care bill being weighed by Republicans in the U.S. Senate would impact Massachusetts.

    Gov. Charlie Baker warned the plan by Senate Republicans to overhaul health care could cost Massachusetts a cumulative total of $8.2 billion by 2025 and result in about 264,000 Bay State residents losing their health insurance coverage.

   The Senate bill is similar to one that passed in the House last month in that both would make deep cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays for health care for the poor and disabled. In Massachusetts the program is called MassHealth.

  Baker revealed his analysis of the Senate bill in a letter addressed to Massachusetts U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and sent to each member of the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation.

Congressman Richard Neal, the dean of the delegation, said they don’t need convincing on the issue from the Republican governor.

"There are a number of Republican governors, Sandoval in Nevada, Kasich in Ohio, Baker in Massachusetts, who have all expanded Medicaid and said it has worked, and I think Gov. Baker is right on target with what he is suggesting," said Neal.

Neal, speaking with reporters in Springfield Tuesday, pointed to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s report on the Senate’s bill that concluded it would result in 22 million Americans losing their health insurance.

   " This is really, cleverly, a tax cut disguised as a health reform bill," said Neal.

   Neal said Senate Republicans had “foolishly” followed the lead of House Republicans and drafted the bill in secret and as a consequence it is now opposed by the medical community including advocates for patients, doctors, nurses, hospitals and commercial health insurers.

  " This is going to curtail and cut benefits for people in nursing homes, it is going to cut opioid treatment and it will subtract from the Medicare trust fund," warned Neal.

  An earlier analysis of the House health care bill by the Urban Institute estimated that if it became law, the uninsured rate in Massachusetts would go above 10 percent by 2022.  Currently, the state’s uninsured rate is 2.8 percent, the lowest in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2005, Massachusetts passed a health coverage law that became a model for the federal Affordable Care Act, widely referred to as Obamacare.

If Republicans succeed in repealing and replacing Obamacare it would be a serious setback for Massachusetts, according to Deborah Hollingsworth, a veteran social worker.

   "It will devastate Massachusetts," said Hollingsworth. " Over the last 10 years we have seen such improvement in people being insured, people being able to stay home and out of nursing homes and get better care. It is just hard to see an erosion of that safety net for the folks who are most vulnerable."

Baker said he was disappointed by a lack of bipartisan effort in Washington to fix problems with the current health care law.

  The governors of New York and Connecticut have also released critical analyses of the bill.

Late Tuesday, Senate Republican leaders postponed a vote on the bill until after the July 4th recess, in a sign the legislation as currently written does not have the votes to pass.

The record-setting tenure of Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno. The 2011 tornado and its recovery that remade the largest city in Western Massachusetts. The fallout from the deadly COVID outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers Home. Those are just a few of the thousands and thousands of stories WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill has covered for WAMC in his nearly 17 years with the station.
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