Bill Cassidy, the Former Moderate Leading the Last Gasp to Repeal Obamacare

By Jonathan Chait

September 18, 2017
11:37 am

Earlier this year, Senator Bill Cassidy had claimed a role as his party’s primary heretic on health care. The Louisiana Republican slaughtered all manner of party sacred cows, culminating in an emotional appearance with Jimmy Kimmel, where he promised to safeguard health care for the sick and vulnerable. What happened next was depressingly familiar. Cassidy stopped criticizing his team and got onboard with their plan, ceasing his heresies and voting reliably for the various, doomed iterations of repeal and replace that came up through the summer. This was a familiar story of a dissident in a polarized Congress yanked back into line by his leadership.

What happened after that is the unusual part. Having surrendered his independence, Cassidy did not merely settle for the quiet life of an auto-voting partisan. He has transformed himself yet again, this time into a tireless crusader for repeal. While even many of the staunchest right-wingers in Congress have been willing to let the Obamacare repeal crusade die, Cassidy has thrown himself almost single-handedly into its revival.

Cassidy has parted ways with his original co-sponsor, moderate Maine senator Susan Collins, with whom he hoped to build a bipartisan coalition, and is now partnering with South Carolina conservative Lindsey Graham. (The latter is now pleading with Breitbart to pressure the Republican leadership for a vote.) Cassidy-Graham is a plan to cut health-care subsidies — both Medicaid and tax credits for people on the individual market — by progressively deeper levels, up to one-third lower after ten years, after which point funding would end entirely unless reauthorized:



It would also allow states to weaken protections for people with preexisting conditions, giving insurers the freedom and incentive to segment their products, so that they charge less to healthier customers and much more to sicker ones.

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