Can we please stop praising Bill Cassidy?

Are we finally ready to get over our obsession over Bill Cassidy's "bipartisanship"?   You might think it would be enough now that he is continuing to lead the charge against the Affordable Care Act even after the defeat of last month's repeal effort. This week, Gambit highlighted the release of a CBPP report that's been in the works for a while.  The report shows the potential devastating effect of passing the latest version of Repeal/Replace Cassidy has been hawking.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, released a new analysis this morning evaluating the effects of the Cassidy-Graham amendment attached to the Senate's most recent health care plan. Should Cassidy-Graham form the basis of a new ACA repeal effort, as some have speculated it might, the report warns it may share many problems with earlier Senate plans. According to the analysis, under a Cassidy-Graham plan, Louisiana could lose $2.3 billion in health care funding by 2026.

"In general, the plan would effectively punish states that have been especially successful at enrolling low- and moderate-income people in the Medicaid expansion," the report said. (More than 400,000 people in Louisiana are estimated to be covered under the state's Medicaid expansion.) "It would cause many millions of people to lose coverage, radically restructure and deeply cut Medicaid [and] increase out-of-pocket costs for individual market consumers."

And yet any given afternoon this past month, we have been liable to find local commentators like Stephanie Grace here hopeful, as ever, that Cassidy finally has an opportunity to get together with some Serious People and "actually do some good."

While President Donald Trump has tauntingly threatened to let Obamacare "implode" by withholding key payments due insurers who offer policies on the law's exchanges, HELP chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democratic ranking member Patty Murray of Washington have scheduled hearings next month aimed shoring them up instead. So Cassidy — along with the two other Republican opponents of skinny repeal, Collins and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, who are also on the committee — may finally get to do something on health care.

Unlike all those repeal and replace proposals that died, this is an effort that would likely get bipartisan support. And more importantly, it could actually do some good.

What the "some good" that we're expecting to be done here could actually be, Grace doesn't say.  It is implied, though, that the aforementioned bipartisan support would be all the validation she or any of us should require of any policy. 

The week prior, Grace based yet another column on the ridiculous premise that, during the latest round of Obamacre Follies, Bill Cassidy represented some "less draconian" approach to denying people health care.  Grace asserts in that column, "There's a lot of work left to do in the middle," implying that Cassidy really wants to approach health care policy from what we are to presume is a reasonable, "centrist" position.  By framing the debate this way, Grace does her readers and anyone concerned about health care policy a disservice.  Cassidy is trying do work "in the middle." Therefore Casssidy's radical proposal to cut and block grant Medicaid is suddenly a "centrist" position.  In searching for a virtuous middle to praise, we've allowed the the bounds of the discussion to list still further to the right.

Also curious has been Grace's continual fascination with Cassidy's citing of the so-called "Jimmy Kimmel Test," which came into the vernacular because a professional celebrity interviewer told a story about how the pre-existing conditions provision of the ACA affected him personally.  Because no hardships actually exist in this country until they are experienced by millionaires on TV, Kimmel's name became attached to anyone wishing to express vaguely defined doubts about the various repeal bills.  The "test" itself was defined differently by different people. It could have meant a requirement that pre-existing conditions remain protected, but Cassidy never committed to such a thing so that didn't really happen.  Generally it just meant, let's not make Jimmy Kimmel immediately sad.

And the thing that makes Jimmy Kimmel the most sad is "partisanship."  Which made this an especially stupid test.

Note that Kimmel laid the blame for this “nonsense” at the feet of “partisan squabbles.” In his telling, the fault lies not with one of the “teams” but with the games they play in Washington, at the expense of the rest of us. But this is an untenable analysis of the political present.

Kimmel might have paused to ask exactly why the positive change in health care reform that he described occurred in 2014. If he had, he might have noticed that it was the result of another “partisan squabble”—i.e., a bill that the Democratic Party had pushed and passed and that the entire Republican Party had made it their singular mission to oppose.

All politics is a "partisan squabble." Politics is a thing what we have to do because we have serious disagreements about policy goals.  Some of us want to make quality health care available to everyone regardless of their material circumstances.  Others among us would prefer to give rich people huge tax cuts regardless of the consequences.  There's no "bi-partisan solution" to this.  There is conflict. From that conflict inevitably comes imperfect results and even what we might call compromise. But there are also winners and losers determined in the process. So it matters which "team" you are on. Which means, also, you have to be on one.

I suppose it's fine that celebrity muffinheads like Kimmel don't really understand this. But it's more difficult to understand how someone like Grace, whose job it is to write about politics, does not. Or that she pretends not to when it suits her or her paper's preference for promoting "bipartisanship" as a virtue unto itself. Media gatekeepers who trade in this delusion are not only obscuring the substance of the policy debate they describe.  By setting the limits of what is politically possible when the health care of millions of Americans is at stake, they may even be endangering lives.