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Week In The News: Health Care Reveal, GOP Victories, Philando Castile

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Curtain’s up on the Republican Senate health care bill. The GOP scores in Georgia. Dashcam video of the Philando Castile shooting. Otto Warmbier dies. Our weekly news round table goes behind the headlines.

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell smiles as he leaves the chamber after announcing the release of the Republicans' healthcare bill, Thursday, June 22, 2017. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell smiles as he leaves the chamber after announcing the release of the Republicans' healthcare bill, Thursday, June 22, 2017. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

American health care up for grabs again this week as Senate Republicans unveil their plan. Big changes. Democrats cry foul. It’s up for a vote next week. In Georgia, a big Republican win and setback for Democrats. On Twitter, the President says ‘I didn’t tape Comey’ — after suggesting maybe he did. We’ve got close calls with Russian jets, the terrible Philando Castille tapes, Bill Cosby’s hung jury, the death of Otto Warmbier. This hour On Point: Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines. -- Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Stephen Hayes, editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard. (@stephenfhayes)

Juana Summers, senior writer for CNN Politics. (@jmsummers)

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst. (@JackBeattyNPR)

From Tom's Reading List

Washington Post: What the Senate bill changes about Obamacare — "Senate Republican leadership unveiled their health-care bill Thursday morning, after weeks of crafting it behind closed doors. The bill takes major steps to roll back provisions of the Affordable Care Act but doesn’t go as far as the House’s version. In both bills, the spending cuts made by Medicaid and other programs would go to fund a substantial tax cut for the health-care industry and the rich."

NPR: After Georgia Win, A Triumphant Trump Returns To Campaign Trail In Iowa — "Still basking in the glow of a big Georgia special election victory for the GOP, President Trump pushed aside the controversies that have hamstrung his administration in the past month and returned to the stage most comfortable to him — the campaign trail."

CNN: Philando Castile shooting: Dashcam video shows rapid event — "What's most shocking is how fast it happened. It took just 40 seconds for an ordinary traffic stop to turn deadly — from a police officer saying, "Hello, sir," to him firing seven shots at a seated motorist. But the police dashboard camera video released Tuesday adds a visceral element to what police witnesses had described — unnerving even in the context of other police shootings and after a video taken by Philando Castile's passenger went viral."

Week In The News Highlights

Senate Health Care Bill

Stephen Hayes: "In effect, this is two different bills welded together. One basically keeps in place the structure, the architecture of Obamacare and increases spending in the near term, and then the trade off there for conservatives is reforms in the long term to Medicaid and other things. The question facing Republican senators is, whether you believe that the near term spending and the preservation of this architecture of Obamacare is worth the promise of these future reforms. And I think history would tell us that there's reason to be skeptical that we'll see the reforms that are promised.

Juana Summers: "This isn't just about a legislative victory for one side or the other, there are real people, both wealthy and not wealthy, young and old, who are trying to figure out how to best come up with coverage and health care for their families. There's no question that, taking many partisan views out of it aside, if either the Senate bill that was released on Thursday, likely to see a vote next week, or the House bill, either one were to pass, it will fundamentally reshape and industry that is responsible for an enormous chunk of the American economy, that affects every household in this country.

Republicans Score In Georgia Special Election

Juana Summers: "This would have been a really humbling defeat for Republicans. This was the most expensive house race we've seen, which I think is an indication of just how grueling 2018 is going to be for the national parties ... Democrats have some learning to do about how to best handle the president in these competitive districts. It's going to be a different playbook than we saw in 2016, when almost every single moment of every race that we watched across the country was about the president invoking then-candidate Trump at every step of the way.

Russia And State Election Security

Jack Beatty: "These 21 states, we need to find out what states they are. And we need to find out what happened in those states with voter rolls. Local reporting is coming up with some interesting findings. Dallas County, for example, overwhelming for Hillary Clinton, it was targeted 17 times according to their sources, by outside groups trying to get their voting rolls. And neighboring counties that we were Republican, were not ... I just can't believe that over there in Russia they know how to target these counties.

New Video Of Philando Castille Shooting

Juana Summers: "This really shows one of the clearest pictures we've seen yet of these fatal encounters between African American men and police. What strikes me most is that just 74 seconds elapsed from when that traffic stop happened until Philando Castille was shot. And it's really hard to hear the pain and see that reality come out.

Stephen Hayes: "As heartbreaking as the actual video itself was, there was another video of his girlfriend talking to the 4-year-old who was in the car, that is absolutely tragic and heartbreaking.

This program aired on June 23, 2017.

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