IF ONLY WE HAD AN INSTITUTION THAT WOULD INFORM US ABOUT SUCH ALARMING DEVELOPMENTS

Whatever McConnell/Ryan/Trumpcare looks like in its final form, it will eviscerate Medicaid to give huge tax cuts to the rich. Greg Sargent notes that many Americans don't seem to know this:

Cutting spending on the poor to facilitate a huge tax cut for the rich, in many ways, is the plan.

But what if a large majority of Americans don’t have a clear sense that the plan even does this? A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll out today suggests this may be the case, which hints at a number of troubling things about where this debate is headed next.

The Kaiser poll finds that only 38 percent of Americans know that the GOP plan makes “major reductions” in Medicaid spending. Another 27 percent say it makes “minor” reductions; 13 percent say it makes no reductions; and 20 percent say they don’t know. If this polling is right, that means at least 6 in 10 Americans are unaware of the central feature of the GOP plan....

Why don't they know this? According to Sargent, it's because Republicans are so clever:

All of this suggests that in some key ways, the GOP strategy is working. Republicans have gone to enormous lengths to obscure the plan’s profoundly regressive features. They have endlessly told the lie that no one will be worse off (because everyone will have “access” to affordable coverage), and they’ve developed numerous cleverly designed talking points designed to create the impression that, by slowly phasing in the loss of coverage for millions over time, this will create a painless transition to … well, to a blissful state in which everyone, again, has “access” to affordable coverage.

Left unmentioned by Sargent is the fact that an institution of which he's a part -- the mainstream press -- could have been giving a great deal of attention to this fact and informing us in prominently placed news stories that a Republican bill really could become law in early July. This has been clear since early this month, but Russiagate and various Trump kerfuffles were of so much interest that the news barely trickled out.

Brian Beutler of The New Republic has attributed this failure to "the media bias toward 'new' news." But how can it be argued that there was no "new" news here? It had been widely assumed that the Senate would struggle to pass a health care bill, then suddenly it became clear to reporters who were paying attention that Senate Republicans weren't struggling, and the wiliest, sneakiest, most amoral tactician in Washington, Mitch McConnell, was putting the bill on a glide path to passage by July 4. That wasn't news? Reporters who were paying attention knew that the Medicaid cuts were comparable in their severity to the cuts in the House bill. That wasn't news? To gain prominence, does every story have to be gift-wrapped for reporters and editors by sources who want the story out?

The media failed us in the 2016 election, obsessing over emails rather than issues. The media failed again this month.