By U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D.-Va.)

Worries about healthcare keep countless families up at night.

Good health care policy can give people peace of mind that an unexpected illness won’t irreparably harm a loved one or break the bank. Bad health care policy can put parents in the awful position of choosing between making a house payment or paying a child’s medical bill.

Last week, Senate Republicans unveiled a bill that would be devastating for Virginians’ access to healthcare, and on Tuesday, they were forced to pause their effort to ram it through the Senate this week. I hope Senate Republicans will change course, cancel any plans to pass this deeply flawed bill, and begin work on a better bill with bipartisan input.

The bill unveiled last week would slash traditional Medicaid, a program that more than 1 million Virginians depend on, by $772 billion over 10 years. Virginia’s Medicaid program will be cut by $1.4 billion over the next seven years. Who are the people who get health care through Medicaid? One of them is named Blake, a 4-year-old with a medical condition that requires full-time care. I met Blake’s mother, Kim, at a roundtable I held in Richmond shortly after the Senate health care bill was released. Kim told me that, without Medicaid, their family would not be able to afford Blake’s medical services.

In Virginia, more than 600,000 children rely on Medicaid for cancer treatments, special education, autism services, family support and a wide range of other needs. In addition to children, more than 200,000 Virginia Medicaid recipients are people with disabilities, and 360,000 are parents, caregivers or pregnant women. Nearly 80,000 older Virginians receive Medicaid coverage. We should be improving health care access and affordability for these people, not reducing their coverage.

In addition to cutting Medicaid, the Republican health care bill would allow insurance companies to charge 55- to 64-year-olds up to five times the rate they can charge younger patients, effectively instituting an “age surcharge.” And by defunding Planned Parenthood, the bill would threaten essential services the organization provides and would particularly hurt the nearly 25,000 Virginians who rely on Planned Parenthood for primary health care.

Further, by allowing states to eliminate some of the Affordable Care Act’s covered essential health benefits, this bill would allow insurance companies to no longer include opioid addiction treatment, mental health care or prenatal care in their plans. We need to step up our efforts to address drug addiction and mental health. Why would we cut back on these protections?

The Congressional Budget Office’s review of this bill confirms the disaster it would inflict. If it’s passed, 22 million people are estimated to lose coverage over the next decade — 15 million next year alone

Worst of all, the bill gives a huge tax cut to wealthy folks with the money slashed from health care for the vulnerable.

I’m opposed to the Senate bill, but I’m not opposed to working with Republicans on it. On Jan. 5, two days after I had joined the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I led a group of 13 Democrats who wrote to Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, the committee’s chairman, and to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, telling them that we would like to work with Republicans on ways to improve our health care system.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Delaware, and I introduced a bill this month to address the stability of the individual health care marketplaces. By creating a program to provide certainty in the marketplace, our bill would lower premiums and encourage more companies to offer plans for Virginians. Improving the individual marketplaces is the exact type of reform that both parties can agree on. But there has been no willingness to hold a public hearing or take up these ideas in committee.

Why can’t we discuss improvements to the Republican-drafted bill? What could be wrong in letting the HELP and Finance committees, which focus on health care, take a look at the bill? What could be wrong with allowing public witnesses — patients, doctors and nurses, leaders of health care organizations — to testify about what they like or dislike about the bill?

The bill before the Senate now is not the answer to the problems. The only way to get health care legislation right is to accept input from both parties and all stakeholders, including the American public. I’m ready to work with my Republican colleagues on an alternative to what’s currently before the Senate, because jamming such a flawed bill through the Senate next month would put far too many people’s health at risk.

Roberta Oster Blog, Healthcare