Despite his obvious lack of qualifications, Senate Republicans recently decided to put Mehmet Oz, a controversial television personality and failed U.S. Senate candidate, in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The former physician went to Capitol Hill this week to lobby in support of the GOP’s domestic policy megabill, and in the process, Oz inadvertently raised an important point. The Washington Post reported:
While congressional Republicans have largely framed their massive bill as a tax and immigration package, on Tuesday, Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the bill is also a ‘health reform’ measure. … ‘This is the most ambitious health reform bill ever in our nation’s history,’ Oz told reporters Tuesday after attending the Senate Republicans’ weekly lunch alongside Vice President JD Vance.
In a way, what Oz said was true: The GOP’s reconciliation package — the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — is “the most ambitious health reform bill ever in our nation’s history,” but not in the way the CMS chief meant.
On the surface, the Republican legislation is made up of massive tax breaks, which has touched off an important debate about whether it’s a good idea to redistribute wealth toward those with the most and away from those with the least. But make no mistake: The GOP’s bill also deserves to be seen as a health care bill, which is “ambitious” to the extent that few have ever even tried to do this much damage to their own country’s health care system in one proposal.
As we learned two weeks ago, for example, estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the Republican bill would leave an additional 16 million Americans without health insurance, in part through Medicaid cuts and in part by gutting core elements of the Affordable Care Act.
But that analysis was based on the version of the legislation approved by the GOP-led House. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn explained, the changes drafted by Senate Republicans actually make the bill worse.
Pretty much every blow to health care that was in the House version of the bill remains in the bill language Senate Finance Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) released on Monday. And some of the blows could land even harder. … The projections for the Senate bill might be even more severe. Oz characterized the far-right gambit as health care “reform,” which might be true in a literal sense, if one defines “reform” as imposing “changes.” But there’s no reason to believe that American consumers and families are looking for Medicaid cuts, ACA cuts and “reforms” that would undermine hospitals — though these outcomes would be unavoidable if this not-so-beautiful legislation became law. Cohn’s analysis concluded, “For now, almost all elected Republicans seem content to keep going with their big beautiful bill. But they should be spooked — and maybe they will be, once they realize what’s truly in there.” Or put another way, “ambitious” changes aren’t always good changes.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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