As far as I can tell, the far-right holdouts on the health care bill actually have a really legitimate demand.

So, like, there are a couple ways you can do health care. One is ‘the government decides which services are basic human rights and pays for them’, which is how most countries do it. That’s not happening in the U.S. any time soon. The debate is more between flavors of ‘the government decides which services are basic human rights and then requires insurance companies to cover them and then helps you pay for them with subsidies’.

And the Republicans are offering shit subsidies. So if they have a long list of which services are basic human rights - if they demand that all insurance plans offer genuine comprehensive coverage - then there will not be any health care plans on offer that aren’t obscenely expensive, and most poor people will have to just skip getting health care altogether. 

The numbers are all made up, but imagine the Republicans give every person an $800 health care subsidy annually. Then imagine that insurance companies are willing to offer catastrophic coverage - insurance against cancer and heart attacks and getting hit by a bus and being diagnosed with a rare condition whose medications cost $10k a month - which doesn’t cover any routine expenses like wellness checks and dental, doesn’t cover therapy, doesn’t cover addiction programs - for $800/year. And they’re prepared to offer actually decent health insurance - which has minimal co-pays and covers therapy and wellness checks and vaccines and therapy and so on - for $6000 a year. 

Right now, by law, they can’t offer the $800 plan, because therapy and addiction programs and wellness checks are things the government considers basic human rights and you are not allowed to offer health insurance that doesn’t cover them. So the only plan you’d be offered is the $6000 one, and if you’re a poor person, you probably can’t make that work, so you don’t buy health insurance at all. 

The far-right caucus wants to make it legal to sell the very restricted $800 plan, which doesn’t cover anything close to everything you need but which is, with the subsidy, free. That’s better than no insurance and no subsidy, which is what unmodified Trumpcare gets you.

You’re welcome to be like ‘okay but the government messed up appallingly for this to even be a choice we have’, and you are 100% right. But I’d rather have a bad cheap plan than nothing.