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contradictory noises over the last few months, occasionally indicating that she does not want to see the expansion repealed.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

As Republican moderates cave on Medicaid cuts, what can Dems do?

As I feared back in March, the "moderate" Republicans in the Senate who profess concern about plans to repeal the ACA Medicaid expansion and impose per capita caps on federal funding for Medicaid are going squish. They'll settle for slowing repeal of the expansion rather than stopping it, and perhaps for some partial easing of the per capita caps, such as exempting coverage for the disabled.

Now as in March, Republican senators in states that have benefited from the expansion speak as if repeal of the expansion and a steady erosion in federal funding for all Medicaid programs is a natural disaster that they must help their constituents cope with, rather than their own free choice to inflict suffering on vulnerable people to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.

Here's Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, until now the strongest defender among Republican senators of maintaining ACA-level funding, speaking to Matt Fuller and Sam Stein of the Huffington Post. Over 300,000 Louisianians have gained Medicaid coverage since incoming governor John Bel Edwards implemented the expansion, beginning July 1, 2016.

"Moderate" Republican opposition to AHCA is looking very squishy

Hours before House Republicans published a full draft of their ACA repeal-and-replace bill, the so-called American Health Care Act, four Republican senators in states that have expanded Medicaid -- Portman, Capito, Gardner and Murkowski -- sent a letter to Mitch McConnell from warning that the repeal bill should provide "stability" for beneficiaries of the expansion.

Given the letter's timing, and its expressed concern for beneficiaries of the Medicaid expansion, some accounts of the repeal bill's release (e.g., Chait's) interpreted it as opposition to the bill. But it was not that. In fact it may have been the opposite. Those who are anticipating rejection of the House bill by Senators who have expressed qualms about un-insuring expansion beneficiaries should take warning.