With all of the daily headlines about the Trump administration flooding your news feed, it can be dangerously easy for certain policy issues to get overlooked. Some argue that news of the GOP health care bill, the details of which are largely unknown, is getting lost in the shuffle.

Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sought to bring the discussion straight to the people by hosting a live conversation about the GOP bill and taking audience questions.

“It is hard for me to understand how any member of the United States Senate thinks it is acceptable to go forward without any open debate on the Republican Senate proposal,” Sanders says at the start of the discussion. The reason for this lack of hearings, he contends, is “if you have something that stinks to high hell, that will decimate the American people, you want to keep it as secret as possible.”

The two senators, who are both on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, note that they—and the majority of their colleagues in the Senate—have no idea what is in the Republican health care plan, which is likely to receive a vote as early as June 29. The bill, the American Health Care Act, received widespread criticism while in the House, especially after the Congressional Budget Office said it would leave 23 million Americans uninsured.

Warren and Sanders discuss the importance of Medicaid, a program that Warren contends Republicans are “destined to cut” in their new bill. She adds that the GOP is making these cuts so that it can also reduce taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

“This thing should just be called for what it is: It is a ‘tax cut for billionaires’ bill,” Warren says. “It’s paid for out of everyone else’s hides.”

“We have to be part of the political process like we’ve never been before,” Sanders says to viewers. “You have got to act in an unprecedented way. Get involved in any way you can.”

Watch the full discussion and Q&A in the video above.

—Posted by Emma Niles

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