WASHINGTON, D.C. — JUNE 27, 2017 — This morning on News One Now, host and managing editor Roland Martin interviewed Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) and Democratic strategist Joel Payne about the most recent news from the Congressional Budget Office regarding the catastrophic senate health care bill. If the current proposed bill were to pass, 22 million people would lose their insurance in the next decade – 15 million of which would be those covered by Medicaid. The bill would lower federal deficits by $321 billion dollars, but premiums and deductibles would go up significantly.

“You can’t take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the system and think you’re going to be covering more or having the same number of people with insurance. If you take hundreds of millions out, you’re going to have hundreds of millions of people with less coverage,” said Scott. “You’ve got a situation where they will be much worse off – and the question is why is anybody supporting the plan? You’re gonna pay more, get less, 22 million uninsured, and you also have an insurance market that’s unstable. When you allow people to wait until they get sick before they can buy insurance, people will wait. People will choose not to be insured. But it’s not a random group of people – it’s healthy people. Those insured will be sicker, prices will go up.”

Payne thinks that this is just an extension of the lack of priorities on the part of the Republican Party.

“It’s a tax cut. It’s a gigantic tax cut for the wealthy. I don’t actually think McConnell wants to pass this bill. I actually think that he wouldn’t mind losing this vote because they don’t want to own healthcare,” said Payne. "It’s never been a priority for them. When you look at their actions, they’ve had seven years to come up with a plan, and this is the best they can come up with. I hope this finally dispatches this as a notion that Donald Trump actually cares about these voters that he claims to care about. He talked about this on the campaign trail – he never intended to actually do anything on this. This was never an intention on his part.”

Martin also spoke with Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color, about a new mid-year progress report released by the organization studying how Democrat and Progressive campaign organizations missed targeting Black voters, and how they could succeed in 2018. The report, titled “Return of the Majority: Another Billion Dollar Blunder?” examines how little money was spent on Black voter mobilization and the danger of replicating that outcome in mid-term elections. Phillips added that campaign organizations such as the Democratic National Committee will spend $750 million dollars heading into the 2018 race, and that this report is to demand more accountability and attention.

“The reason that we’re alarmed is because if you look at the Ossoff race in Georgia, they spent $18 million dollars on TV ads and almost all of those ads were targeted to the Trump voters. That kind of money could have paid hundreds of people on the ground in the communities turning out black voters. 50-60,000 black voters, we think, were left on the table in that district,” said Phillips of the failed congressional election in Georgia between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel.

“People do not understand that the Democrats actually have the majority. The way to take back the house, the way to take back the country is getting more people out to vote. We neglected the African American vote in 2016, [and] the African American vote fell precipitously below 2004 rates. The blunder in 2016 was in targeting the wrong sector of voters. The danger and alarm we’re facing now is that we’re replicating that blunder, still going after the wrong voters and not investing in the core voters who propelled us to victory with Obama.”

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