Senate "moderates" promised long ago to support the ACA repeal bill in progress

I keep reading that Senators Capito and Portman and Heller, relative Republican "moderates" from states that have embraced the ACA Medicaid expansion,  have reversed themselves by signaling willingness to repeal the expansion if the repeal timeline is stretched out.

Capito may have made some contradictory noises over the last few months, occasionally indicating that she does not want to see the expansion repealed.

But look again at the letter to McConnell that Capito and Portman signed onto just before the House repeal bill, the AHCA, was released.  That letter, which was read as defense of the Medicaid expansion, demanded

that any health care replacement provide states with a stable transition period and the opportunity to gradually phase-in their populations to any new Medicaid financing structure.

In Republican-speak, that means expanding the timeline in which enhanced federal funding for the Medicaid expansion population is phased out -- as the Senate bill will do. I examined the letter's consistency with the course the Senate is undertaking now in more detail in this post.

Squish!

The meme that Republican senators in states that have embraced the ACA Medicaid expansion will block the House repeal bill from passing substantially as is and save the expansion continues. Here's Politico's Burgess Everett with news of a closed-door meeting in Nevada:

Sen. Dean Heller panned House Speaker Paul Ryan's bill to repeal and replace Obamacare during a closed meeting with constituents on Saturday, according to audio obtained by POLITICO.

The remarks by Heller, the most vulnerable GOP senator on the ballot next year, are another sign of the difficult prospects the House bill faces in the other chamber. Already, more than a half-dozen senators have criticized the bill, and Republicans can afford to lose only two votes.

Hail defender! As Nevada's Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, boasted in a letter to the House leadership in January, Nevada has slashed its uninsured rate almost in half since ACA enactment, from 23% to 12% -- mainly through the Medicaid expansion, which has increased Medicaid enrollment by 288,000 since September 2013 in a state with 2.5 million residents. Plenty to defend!

So what is Heller's promise to Nevadans? Back to Politico: