To Your Health: The Congressional Budget Office evaluation of the Senate healthcare bill is expected this week as leaders press for a vote before the 4^th of July break.

Republican leaders are privately negotiating with five reluctant Senators who say they can’t support the bill because it’s likely to hurt the elderly and infirm while shedding millions of people from medical insurance. The CBO predicted that 23 million Americans would lose coverage under the House healthcare bill, 14 million of them now on Medicare.

Opposition is coming from all sides. The healthcare industry is almost universally against it, and the billionaire Koch brothers who spend millions to sway politics, say it’s insufficiently conservative, which probably means it’s not cruel enough.

Many of the cuts under the Senate bill are in Medicaid, which was expanded under Obamacare. President Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway blithely said on ABC that, “Obamacare took Medicaid, which was designed to help the poor, the needy, the sick, disabled, also children and pregnant women, it took it and went way above the poverty line to many able-bodied Americans who … should at least see if there are other options for them.”

Conway said, “If they are able-bodied and they want to work, then they’ll have employer-sponsored benefits like you and I do.”

Employer-sponsored health insurance covers about 150 million Americans, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The Foundation says that among the non-elderly adults on Medicaid, 59 percent already have jobs. What Conway and the authors of the Senate bill ignore is that millions of the able-bodied people on Medicaid work in jobs and industries that don’t offer healthcare. That’s why Medicaid was expanded under Obamacare.

President Trump said yesterday on Fox News, “Health care is a very, very tough thing to get. But I think we’re going to get it. We don’t have too much of a choice, because the alternative is the dead carcass of Obamacare.” He’s the President.

On Bullshit: While we are talking about the President, he said on Fox News yesterday that, “I just heard for the first time today that Obama knew about Russia for a long time before the election, that the CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before they even, you know, before the election.”

It was well-established during the campaign that the Russians were hacking and President Obama spoke publicly about it.

Matthew Yglesias writing for Vox contemplates whether Trump is a liar or simply a bullshitter and comes down on the side of bullshitter:

“Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.

But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.”

Down in the Mine: While President Trump promises to restore coal jobs in America, the world’s largest coal mining company announced that it is closing 37 mines. Coal India, which produces 82 percent of that country’s coal, is bowing to pressure from cheaper solar energy. India’s government forecasts that renewable energy will provide 57 per cent of the country’s power by 2027.

World: At least nine people were killed and 31 are missing after a tourist ferry carrying 170 people capsized and sank on a lake about an hour outside of Medellin, Colombia. Pleasure boats and jet skis rushed in to help passengers as the ferry went down in about five minutes. — The Japanese airbag company Takata filed for bankruptcy in Japan and the US after it was drained by having to replace faulty airbags. The company’s airbags blew up, killing 16 people.

Moving Day: A hospital in Boise spent $300,000 over the weekend to move a giant Sequoia tree a few blocks away so the hospital can expand. The tree planted in 1912 was a gift from John Muir, father of the national parks system, who gave four sequoia seedlings to an Idaho forester in the early 20th century. The tree moved over the weekend is the only one still living. The tree is going to get more care than a hospital patient to ensure that it survives.

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