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TRUMPadelphia: Healthcare and the opioid crisis, Christie at the beach, and more

The future of the GOP's healthcare bill - and the future of Medicaid - is resting, in part, on how senators plan to tackle the opioid crisis. And whatever they decide will likely hit hardest in states that, like Pennsylvania and New Jersey, expanded Medicaid under Obamacare.

Protesters march around the Capitol Building against the Senate GOP healthcare bill in Washington Wednesday.
Protesters march around the Capitol Building against the Senate GOP healthcare bill in Washington Wednesday.Read moreAndrew Harnik

Good morning, friends. This edition of the newsletter is a little late and your correspondent is a lot sunburned, thanks to a holiday weekend spent on a New Jersey beach not closed to the public.

You're getting this email because you signed up for a newsletter about President Trump and how his policies affect Philadelphia. If you're reading this online or someone forwarded it to you, you can sign up here to get it in your inbox, for free, every week. You can send me questions/concerns/suggestions/affirmations here.

— Aubrey Whelan

Today, let’s talk about healthcare.

What’s at stake

The future of the GOP's healthcare bill — and the future of Medicaid — is resting, in part, on how senators plan to tackle the opioid crisis. And whatever they decide will likely hit hardest in states that, like Pennsylvania and New Jersey, expanded Medicaid under Obamacare.

The backstory

After a secret drafting process (one that included Pa.'s own Pat Toomey), the Senate healthcare bill dropped two weeks ago, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell aiming for a vote before Congress went on recess for July 4. (They're off until Monday.) In the week in between, healthcare activists mobilized, the Congressional Budget Office concluded 22 million more people would be left uninsured under the bill, and several moderate Republican senators said they wouldn't support it — a seeming death knell for a bill that, with a razor-thin GOP margin in the Senate, could afford to lose only two votes. It's been tabled until after the recess, and President Trump isn't exactly speaking up for it.

This is basically exactly what happened with the House's healthcare bill, though, which was resurrected a month later with an amendment that got conservative senators on board, and so McConnell and company are searching for compromises that can get moderates on board. One of the ways they might do that? Expanded funding for battling the opioid crisis, where Medicaid spending has more than doubled over the last five years.

The local angle

The Senate bill, with its plans to push more of the cost of the Medicaid expansion to states and cut the program by $772 billion over 10 years, was roundly criticized in the Philadelphia region, my colleague Don Sapatkin wrote last month. And Gov. Wolf has said the state can't afford to pick up the tab for the Medicaid expansion, which covered some 700,000 Pennsylvanians. (I wrote about a healthcare activist with MS who went two years without treatment before getting coverage under the expansion here.)

And then there's the opioid epidemic sweeping the country, an enormously complicated issue, to which the Senate bill allotted $2 billion over 10 years. In Pennsylvania, 175,000 people got addiction treatment under the Medicaid expansion and private insurance plans from the Affordable Care Act. (While we were all on the beach earlier this week, Sapatkin, the star of this morning's newsletter, broke down a couple recent studies on addiction and Medicaid spending and how that fits in with the Senate bill.)

Moderate senators have said the bill's allotment for addiction spending isn't nearly enough, and last week McConnell agreed to kick them an extra $45 billion. But even that might backfire, POLITICO reported, because the same moderates are still fuming over the larger Medicaid cuts. And, Sapatkin reported Monday, the cost of treating opioid addiction and its related diseases could quadruple even the increased allotment. Whatever happens in the days ahead — and it's really anybody's guess — Senators are in for a very uncomfortable recess.

What they’re saying

"Run for governor and you can have the residence." New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, erstwhile
"The
"They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from." — Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, joining a growing number of states refusing to send the Trump administration their voters' information as part of an investigation into voter fraud. (Gov. Wolf expressed similar sentiments in less colorful language, citing Trump's repeated accusations of voter fraud in Philadelphia during the campaign.)
"Our first amendment protects the press from things like violence and we as American citizens should respect that even if the opinions of the press are not in line with our own."
— Trump ally and current bane of the barrier islands, on his decision to soak up some rays at the governor’s residence on Island Beach State Park — which was closed to everyone else due to a government shutdown

In other news…

  1. North Korea has launched an intercontinental ballistic missile — a not-necessarily unexpected move, the AP reports, but one that has exacerbated tensions in an already unbelievably tense situation. "Does this guy have anything better to do with his life?" President Trump asked of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Twitter Monday.

  2. Trump is meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin this week for the first time since the election, and the mood in the Kremlin is "dismal," the Washington Post reports in a thorough breakdown of what's at stake.

  3. The EPA, attempting to walk back an Obama-era emissions regulation, suffered a setback in court.

  4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Hammonton Blueberry Princess Kellyanne Conway are fans of the same restaurant in Margate.

What I’m reading

  1. A deeply reported account from POLITICO on how the grime-encrusted, crime-ridden, cash-strapped New York City of the 1970s shaped Donald Trump's view of cities — and isolated him from the people who live there.

  2. A blow-by-blow (literally) account by my colleague Joe DiStefano of the convergence of anti-Trump and pro-Trump rallies in Center City this weekend.

  3. A gorgeous feat of writing and reporting in the Washington Post, on a doctor in Minnesota who is his Trump-loving town's only Muslim resident.

A non-political palate cleanser

Our music critic Dan DeLuca's "perfect summer playlist" includes a track from queen of my heart Carly Rae Jepsen, the Canadian pop goddess you've been criminally ignoring for years. Go have a listen and educate yourselves.