when he made this statement earlier, he said, quote, i cannot in good conscious vote for this graham/cassidy proposal. i believe we could do better, working together, republicans and democrats and have not yet really tried. so let s discuss this. former congresswoman lay worth is here of the independent woman s forum board of directors. daniel dress ner, matt lewis, good evening. good to have you all on on this friday. dan, i m going to start with you because this is an extraordinary legacy item for senator john mccain who had to weigh friendship and party loyalty. what s your reaction? my reaction is that the surprising element of this is it is in fact his best friend nft senate lindsey graham is a cosponsor of the bill. in some ways the objections he raised this time aren t weren t that fundamentally different from the elections he raised in
why was there any surprise that john mccain would not support this? well, you re absolutely right. i think when you look back at john mccain s comments just a few weeks ago when the senate first debated their first go around at repealing and replacing obamacare, he was very passionate about the fact that any health care proposal that the senate was going to take up needed to go through regular order, and the graham/cassidy bill did not go through regular order. in fact, i think a lot of people would agree this plan really came out of left field, because republicans and even president trump had said that they were shifting their focus to tax reform, but there are two things about the graham/cassidy proposal that make it different from the health care bill that the senate considered just a few weeks ago. first, this is a bill that was sponsored and really spearheaded by lindsey graham, who is john mccain s best friend in the senate, and secondly, the bill had the support of arizona gov
terrible. honestly, terrible. i call up to different people. well, mr. president. could you have dinner with my wife, myself, my kids, my cousins, my uncles? and i would like to talk to you about it. okay. so they come over, the family. pictures all night. everything. okay. i ll get a vote or whatever. but brutal. you know what that is, folks, right? it s called brutality. the hopes for this latest repeal and replace bill. graham/cassidy went all but dark because mccain msnbc said he couldn t support it. he said it should be something both parties agree on, ideally. he said in part, i cannot in good conscience vote for graham/cassidy proposal. i believe we can do better working together, republicans and democrats and have not yet really tried. nor could i support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance
it s something like acute pain either post-op or injury or something like this. this does not have really much to do with the more global issue and bigger issue of the opioid epidemic and i think it s always important to remind or sort of to talk about this that we balance needing to do something about the abuse and misuse leading to addiction and overdose with the problem of chronic pain in this country, and you know, requiring better training and education for all providers for non-narcotic analgesic and to also understand there are a certain subset of chronic pain patients who will still roir opequire opioid for treatment. dr. natalie azar, thank you so much. we have breaking news at the bottom of the hour. arizona senator john mccain has just come out and given a statement and it reads in part quote, i cannot in good conscience vote for the graham/cassidy proposal.
you ask any republican in the country about obamacare and they will give you the same message. they will tell you it s failing, it s collapsing, they will tell you all the problems it s causing. they have no problem, every republican getting behind it and selling that message. now you put some kind of repeal, replace plan, a real specific plan out there, there has been a noticeable absence of major republican voices out there pushing this, advocating for it, selling it and it s popped up in the polls. we saw a few polls come out in the last couple days on this graham/cassidy proposal, they look similar, they look identical, really, to what we saw earlier this summer when that last effort sunk. you see universal opposition from democrats. you see strong opposition from independents and sort of a split among republicans. one of the things that tells me is you have a lot of major republican voices that have looked at this thing and they have said i can t sell this, i don t want to sell th