House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Sunday claimed that concerns about the process of passing Republicans’ bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, which cleared the House last week in an iteration which has not been scored by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, are “a bogus attack from the left.”
“A lot of your members have conceded they didn’t read the bill. There wasn’t a single committee hearing or committee markup on the finalized version of the bill. There wasn’t a CBO analysis of this bill,” George Stephanopoulos asked Ryan on ABC’s “This Week.” “So have you met your own standard here?”
“Yeah, I think this is kind of a bogus attack from the left. Let me say a couple of things,” Ryan said. “The bill’s been online for two months.”
“Not the final version,” Stephanopoulos interjected.
“The final version was an amendment that was three pages long. It takes you 30 seconds to read,” Ryan said.
Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) on Thursday nevertheless admitted that he did not read the full text of the repeal bill before voting to pass it, because “that’s the way it is.”
“I can probably tell you that I read every word and I wouldn’t be telling you the truth nor would any other member,” Collins said. “I’m just being quite honest.”
Collins later discovered that the bill would nix funding for a health care program in his state.
“More importantly we got two CBO scores,” Ryan told Stephanopoulos on Sunday, referring to the bill’s previous iterations (the version which passed the House has not yet been scored). “And the most recent CBO score showed that we’re perfectly in compliance with the Senate budget rules, which is what matters here.”
That score also estimated that 24 million people would lose their insurance over the next 10 years under the first iteration of the repeal bill.
.@SpeakerRyan says criticizing process of passing health care bill "kind of a bogus attack from the left." https://t.co/W7ipx7kF0u #ThisWeek pic.twitter.com/79a2krf4He
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 7, 2017
Answer: “Yeah, I think this is kind of a bogus attack from the left. Let me say a couple of things,” Ryan said. “The bill’s been online for two months.”
Here’s the problem: Stoopidopoulos didn’t smash that down immediately.
What SHOULD have happened:
Answer: “That’s not what I asked, Congressman. Please try again”
Liar.
The seems to be the uniform stance from all the networks this morning…Let the GOP blatantly lie ( and they are…not little white ones, full on, great big ol’ lies. And lots of them. Basically every defense this morning has been a bold faced lie), and don’t challenge them on any of it.
So a simple three page amendment that lets states opt out of the EHBs and create underfunded high risk pools that impact 25% of the population are narrow changes that have no dramatic effect. Not sure why those narrow changes were the single factor that swayed the “let them eat cake and die in the streets” caucus, but the GOP policy wonk has spoken and I must concede to his greater knowledge of the power of magic asterisks to offset the CBO score.