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Senate Republicans appear to be solidly rejecting their House colleagues’ health-care plan. That shouldn’t be a close call, given the Congressional Budget Office’s findings that the American Health Care Act would increase the ranks of the uninsured by 23 million, while raising the cost of coverage for older and sicker people. Compared with current law — the Affordable Care Act — the out-of-pocket cost of coverage for an older, low-income person would rise by a factor of eight to nine under the AHCA. (Jared Bernstein, 5/30)

Now that our area’s top insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, has announced that it is pulling out of the Affordable Care Act exchange next year, about 67,000 of its customers in Kansas and Missouri are vulnerable. Congressional Republicans insist that they don’t want insurance markets here or anywhere else to fail. But their party has done everything in its power to encourage that outcome. (5/26)

As California liberals go, the Democratic Party often follows. So it’s instructive, if not surprising, that Golden State Democrats are responding to the failure of ObamaCare by embracing single-payer health care. This proves the truism that the liberal solution to every government failure is always more government. (5/26)

Let’s start with what we can almost all agree on: single-payer healthcare is the most effective system for achieving universal health coverage in the U.S. Single-payer almost certainly would be cheaper and simpler than the ridiculous contraption we have now, a mishmash of employer, government and private plans all with different rules and standards. It’s favored by a clear majority of Americans in opinion polls, at least in theory, and it’s a linchpin of popular political movements like Sen. Bernie Sanders’. (Michael Hiltzik, 5/26)

Last month, Democratic House members were given polling data and a set of talking points on health care. The thrust: Hammer Republicans on their Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan, but do it with precision. More implicit, but just as clear, Democrats were advised to stay away from promoting the “Medicare for All” plan that has energized the party’s grass-roots activists and its rank and file in Congress. ... The documents help explain why and how Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is trying to squash her own party’s desire to fight for a health care system in which the government is the single payer for necessary medical expenses and the health insurance industry is all but eliminated as a middle man. (Jonathan Allen, 5/30)

Critics are accusing President Trump’s 2018 budget of “gutting the safety net” with cuts to food stamps and disability insurance. In reality, the White House is proposing long-needed reforms that would fix a dysfunctional disability system that traps Americans in dependency. (5/29)