Leading up to the vote on the American Health Care Act, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused Republicans of projecting while saying the American people will be left in the dark about what is in the new healthcare bill.
Even though Pelosi is famous for saying, “We have to pass the bill [the Affordable Healthcare Act] so that you can find out what’s in it”, Pelosi claims the American people will not know what is in the new bill:
So this is—I always find with the Republicans, including the President of the United States, that they’re modus operandi is to project. We’re going to say about you what is probably likely we would do our ourselves. And what’s what they did.
They put forth a bill, no CBO report—when they were demanding one from us—and we were demanding it ourselves. So it was like, yeah, of course we’ll have a CBO report, we can’t ask our members to vote for something that they don’t know what it is. And so, let’s be gentle and say it’s totally inconsistent and shall we say, a softening of their sotto voce in Italian, of their loud voices that they had to have a CBO report, and you had to have three days notice, and you would always have transparency and everyone would read the bill. But you know what? That’s incidental.
What is important is the consequence of it. The American will not know at the time of this what cost it is in terms of their coverage and in terms of their out-of-pocket, their, the tax on them, what it does to Medicaid, that it does not cover pre-existing conditions no matter how many times they say it. And so we have to stay focused on the substance of this, not the process, but the process affects what the public knows and transparency is a big thing and now the public knows who their Congressperson is and what he or she did in their interest or in the interest of providing a tax break to the wealthiest people in our country.
During her press briefing Thursday, Pelosi asserted that the passage of the Affordable Care Act was “completely different” and that Republicans are hypocrites because members have said their staff members have read the bill:
It was completely different and we could never—you know, our party is a consensus-building party. We could never have passed a bill that I said, tomorrow morning, you’re going to vote on this. It’s just not the Democratic Party. It might be the Republican Party. So, but you point out the hypocrisy of what they are doing. Hours, from last night to today, a matter of hours—not even a full day—they’re putting forth a bill some of the members was quoted as saying, ‘Read the bill? No, some of my staff has read part of it, others have read others of it. No, I don’t think any members have read the whole bill. That’s what staff is for.’ That was one of the Republicans members.
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