Little Rock   How many of us have heard from our mothers that “if we can’t say something good, then don’t say anything at all.” I wish that were the case with the Ryan and some Republicans’ healthcare bill. So far, I’m failing to find any silver lining, other than it’s not a total repeal where we have nothing, but that’s too thin a reed to grab.

There are still no Congressional Budget Office tabulations on the cost of this proposal or the number of people likely to lose healthcare. Some Republicans are even wary and unhappy about being forced to vote on this thing without even that meager level of information. Reporting by the New York Times finds Standard & Poor’s in a report has estimated that 2 to 4 million people would drop out of the individual insurance market, largely people in their 50s and 60s who are too young to qualify for Medicare because of higher costs. Why? One feature of the new proposal is that it would allow insurance companies to increase the gap for older Americans from three times the young to five times the young causing premiums to soar to unaffordable levels.

Several researchers listed the predictable outcomes of transferring these decisions to the states by citing not theories, but the facts on the ground based on what states had done where they have had discretion in the past and get caught with budget shortfalls similar to the ones faced in the 2008 Great Recession. They talked about the blood on Arizona governor Brewer’s hands when that state stopped paying for transplants and allowed people to die. They talked about how states had dealt with billions of dollars from the smoking settlements with tobacco companies and the meager percentage of the funds that had gone to cessation programs as opposed to budget shortfalls, capital expenditures, and a bit of whatever.

Unbelievably there are some Republican Senators who still bridle at any plan at all. More troubling have been some arguments that some are starting to make that we might be better with nothing at all, though that strains credibility as well.

You know it’s bad when we aren’t even getting into the weeds on things like the impact on women. The ban on Planned Parenthood funding just seems like a bizarre, mean spirited outlier which must just drip with questionable legality. Past the first mention, the fact that people would be barred from buying insurance with governmental support that paid for abortions also seems like a flashpoint that hasn’t gotten much attention. Props though to Planned Parenthood for having pushed away the offers for not only continued funding at half-a-billion bucks but an increase, if they were just willing to make a deal and stop doing abortions anywhere, regardless of the fact that no federal money funds any part of their abortion service anyway. Comforting to know that a least one major national nonprofit is unwilling to abandon its mission for money. That must have been something of a shock to the Trumpsters, though the so-called offer was likely something of a wink-and-nod, and never serious anyway.

Or how about mental health services? Will they continue to be supported? Believe me our partners in Alaska with the Mental Health Consumers Action Network (MCAN) are having emergency meetings and deep discussions about this.

The list is endless. The pain tremendous. The death count will be astronomical.

Here’s my point in a nutshell: all of this is bad, and we still don’t know the half of it.