What Went Down On Health Care This Week

At this point, you should be listening very carefully to what Nevada’s Dean Heller says, perhaps more than any other senator. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have voted against the motion to proceed, “repeal and delay” and “repeal and replace.” So they seem like they are going to be “no” on whatever the final Republican bill is, or at least the hardest to sway. Of the 52 Republican senators, 49 voted for either “repeal and delay” or “repeal and replace.” Heller is an outlier: He voted for the motion to proceed, which kept the bill alive, but then voted against both versions of repeal. Heller defended Medicaid on the Senate floor in a speech Wednesday and offered an unsuccessful resolution praising the program. What Heller seems to want is a bill that repeals parts of Obamacare (so he can tell conservatives back home that he followed through on that, and so he can get President Trump off his back) but one that does not include the cuts to traditional Medicaid and the Obamacare Medicaid expansion that have been in most of the drafts of “repeal and replace.” That sounds like the “skinny repeal,” and Heller suggested Wednesday that he could vote for that. But Heller has also indicated that he cares about the views of Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, also a Republican. And on Wednesday night, Sandoval signed onto a letter that suggests a repeal of the individual mandate, one of the ideas involved in the narrow repeal, will cause a spike in premiums. So stay tuned to the Dean Watch; it really matters.