Star Opinion: Flake should listen to McCain and oppose bad GOP health-care bill

The Cassidy-Graham bill — named after its main sponsors, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy — follows in the footsteps of previous half-baked legislation designed to eliminate the ACA. Also distressingly similar is the rush by GOP lawmakers to support a bill under a deadline that precludes any debate, compromise or even a clear idea of how much it would cost or if it would help or hurt.

In opposing the bill, Sen. John McCain has once again set himself apart in the small group of GOP legislators who are willing to vote their principles.

We urge Sen. Jeff Flake — and other Arizona officials — to follow his example.

Obamacare, as the ACA is commonly known, is not perfect, and efforts to improve it would be welcomed. But believing without question that anything that isn’t the ACA would be better is a dangerous gamble.

This kind of blind faith is exemplified by Gov. Doug Ducey, who last week supported the bill without knowing what was in it, claiming Obamacare was a failure and it was “time for it to go.”

But the question shouldn’t be whether the ACA will go or not, but what will be left in its place.

Cassidy-Graham would eliminate the mandate that penalizes individuals if they don’t have insurance, as well as the obligation that most businesses offer insurance to their employees — two unpopular, but crucial, parts of the ACA or any functioning affordable insurance pool that needs to spread risk among the healthy and the sick.

It would also kill the Medicaid expansion, which helps about 80,000 Arizonans and provides coverage to people earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level (about $34,000 for a family of four).

While the bill retains the benefit of young people being able to stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26, it does not protect people with pre-existing conditions.

Cassidy-Graham does not explicitly remove this protection but states could waive rules requiring insurance companies to provide the same coverage at the same price to people with pre-existing conditions as they do everyone else, returning to the old system where medical history could make insurance either prohibitively pricey or lead to bare-bones plans with little value.

Subsidies, which help low- and moderate-income Arizonans buy health insurance, would also disappear. That money, along with the Medicaid expansion funds, would be given to states through block grants that could be spent with little restriction other than paying for health services.

These lump sum grants would also be less than what the states receive now. Arizona’s Sen. Flake claims this “removes the decisions from Washington and gives states significant latitude” over how to best take care of the unique needs in each state. While the one-size-fits-all approach of current health law is a concern, this “flexibility” would guarantee that thousands of Arizonans will lose their insurance.

Although the effects of the Cassidy-Graham bill are yet to be determined by the Congressional Budget Office, other groups have offered their own forecasts, Joint Legislative Budget Committee found Arizona stands to lose $1.7 billion as early as 2020.

As Sen. McCain pointed out in his statement declaring he couldn’t vote for the legislation in good conscience, “I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried.”

We agree. It’s time to try.