Why Don’t Republican Leaders Want Us to Know What’s in Their Health Care Bill?

When the GOP’s Affordable Care Act repeal passed the House back in May, Republican leaders celebrated in the White House Rose Garden. But now that the health care bill has been passed to the Senate, Mitch McConnell and his health care working group are being extremely secretive.

These politicians are hiding their disastrous legislation from public eyes, only to ram it through this month so they don’t have to face constituents on their home turf during congressional recess next month.

Here’s what’s happening

McConnell is drafting  the Trumpcare bill behind closed doors—and we have every reason to believe it will include “defunding” Planned Parenthood by blocking millions of patients from care. At the last possible moment, McConnell will release the bill text, and the Senate will vote on it; with no hearings, barely any time for the public to read it, let alone understand it.

What’s in this bill? No one knows

Behind closed doors and without public input, Republican leaders are scheming to “defund” Planned Parenthood and take away healthcare from millions.

As Julie Rovner, a  veteran reporter who has covered health care since 1986, points out, none of this is normal.

"The extreme secrecy is a situation without precedent, at least in creating health care law,” she writes in the Atlantic. Contrast that with the vigorous debate involved in passing the Affordable Care Act.

—Julie Rovner

Many of us remember how much public debate was involved in passing the Affordable Care Act back in 2009. As Sarah Kliff points out in Vox, Senators spent hours debating the bill and it all took place on C-SPAN for the public to see.

“Senators wanted to talk about the Affordable Care Act and why they believed they needed to pass it,” Kliff writes. “They gave floor speech after floor speech defending its provisions. Patients had months to lobby their legislators on particular issues that they thought were important.”

Now in 2017, Senate Republicans have suggested banning the press from conducting interviews in congressional hallways.

Not even Republican leaders know what’s in the bill

As the health care bill remains shrouded in secrecy, some Senate republicans have suggested that they don’t even know what’s in the legislation.

As Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) explained to Vox,

"I don't know what it is that will actually come forward. This has been part of my frustration. What's the Senate bill going to look like? I don't know."

—Sen. Lisa Murkowski

And those on the health care working group—which is comprised of 13 male Senators and zero female Senators—have indicated they’re unclear on the legislation. “Join the crowd,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said to a reporter on not knowing the bill’s details. Even Trump’s disastrous Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Price, said at a senate hearing that he hadn’t seen the bill.