A new $200,000 radio ad campaign launched Friday, pressuring five key Republican senators to vote against the last-ditch effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.
The ads are funded by the Community Catalyst Action Fund and are running on radio stations in the home states of Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), John McCain (R-AZ), Rob Portman (R-OH), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Susan Collins (R-ME) as well as in Washington, D.C. for the next week.
The group sponsoring the advertisement calls the Graham-Cassidy legislation the “most destructive repeal plan” that’s been introduced in Congress to date. A Senate vote on the bill could come next week ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline for passing Obamacare repeal via simple majority vote.
“There’s an old saying: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results,” the narrator says at the start of the radio ads, which are similar in each state and in D.C. “Well, that’s what congressional leaders are doing right now — pushing another bad health care bill.”
The ads then remind the five senators — who either opposed or were key swing votes on previous repeal bills this summer — that the new legislation includes the same provisions as past repeal efforts, including “massive” cuts to Medicaid.
Murkowski is considered one of the most crucial senators in Republicans’ effort to whip votes. She, Collins and McCain voted against the last repeal attempt in July. She has said she wants to see more information about how the bill would impact her state before she makes any decisions.
Community Catalyst Action Fund previously spent $1.5 million on TV ads over the summer to oppose earlier repeal efforts, The Washington Post reported.
“This bill is a last-ditch effort to turn back the clock and go back to the same damaging, secretive and partisan approach to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to cut Medicaid,” the non-profit’s executive director Robert Restuccia said in a statement. “Senators should reject the Graham-Cassidy repeal plan. Americans want Congress to abandon efforts to repeal the ACA and work in a bipartisan fashion to make our health care better and more affordable, accessible and equitable.”
Listen to the advertisement running on Alaska radio stations below:
Hope it works.
Don’t hold your breath. I think they really will repeal it this time.
Would hope that some other groups would pick this ad up and run it in other solid red States. It’d be worth it, but @sickofitall is right about this.
This will pass. It will pass with a tiebreaker by Pence. It won’t go into effect until after the midterms so as to not affect those seats. The impact won’t be realized for a few years and by then, maybe, the Dems could take this back and undo it. That’s wishful thinking.
I am deeply afraid, as it does feel that way.
If it’s the two Alaska Senators and Collins or Rand who finally vote no, then the GOPers can whimper about how unfair the whole thing is and stiil collect a large proportion of what the Kochs were going to give anyway. And nobody like Heller will suffer because the bill passed.
But folks, we can microanalyze and guess and worry ourselves into the ground, but it’s likely that just like last time some big as yet unforeseen development will come along.
Meanwhile the lobbyists that just about nobody mentions are grinding away silently. Most of their clients are just fine with Obamacare.