Do they honestly think we won't find out?

So that the light of truth does not shine on their monstrous lies.

What a shame. 44 had transparency to work on healthcare, and they need to lie in the dark (get it?!) to take it away.

The final bill was released not long before the vote was scheduled, and a lot of people didn't know what was it in. The defense was that it was produced "transparently," but at the time I didn't know what that meant. The meetings were often closed, but the issues and many proposals were widely discussed.

It wasn't transparent, though, because many of the proposals came in varying formulations. Where would limits be drawn? How would conflicts between different kinds of proposals--subsidies versus coverage, for instance--be handled. We found out about some bits when, say, a bill that would use funds from the sale of a specific wood-by-product was soundly defeated and the reason given by (D) was that it was needed to fund the HRCA.

There was less transparency than claimed. DU had serious discussions over some of this, mostly by accident: Some would claim that the legislation included one proposal, others would claim a different proposal was in it. In fact, for a long time various staffers and lobbyists were working on various bits of it, and at the last minute a consensus was formed over which proposals to include and how to cobble them together. Even then, the Congress played kick the can and dumped a lot of the actual writing of what should be legislation into the Executive branch. "You work out how to implement this and the regs necessary." We see the result of that in some of what Trump's done: In 2011 it was good for the Executive to have that much power; now that it's 2017, it's bad for the Executive to have the same amount of power. (Yes, some of us uttered this warning: it was the same with the ACA, Cuba, and a lot of other Executive-branch initiatives. Make it law or recognize that presidential whim will fill in for legislation.)

We've heard some proposals. Nobody's seriously discussed them, all we hear are negatives because the assumption is there can't be positives. What was flawed and needed revision is now stalwartly defended as a paragon of health legislation by many.

I don't like the secrecy, but it won't last forever. And it has precedent. I'd be tickled pink with three week's prior publication, but "more than 72 hours" seems to be the standard we set.

It sucked at the time, but the short window was a kludge to keep criticism at bay and to make it harder to mount some sort of organized challenge in the Senate. These were good motives that were essential in a democracy when we had them.

"Even one less person covered than Obamacare did, would be a betrayal of the American people, but the last Republican effort was to deny 23m people health coverage."

the Reps. It's something I suppose, but Democrats should be getting the very real fear of what might happen, across to voters. It wouldn't be that they are lying, they'd be telling the truth !!!