Thanks to your phone calls, emails, protests and so much more, Republican leaders once again failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

The decision to cancel a planned vote on the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill follows weeks of pushback from constituents, including protests inside the US Capitol on Monday by hundreds Medicaid and disability-rights activists.

The third GOP senator to oppose the Graham-Cassidy bill was Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who announced her plan to vote no on Monday evening immediately after the Congressional Budget Office released a partial score of the bill, anticipating that millions of people would lose insurance coverage and that federal spending on Medicaid would fall by approximately $1 trillion by 2026.

We applaud Senator Collins and also Senator John McCain for speaking out against the bill and the process that produced it. We will need legislative champions like them to reach across the aisle to renew bipartisan efforts to expand healthcare access and step up investments in community-based prevention. Please tweet a thank you to these senators using @SenatorCollins and @SenJohnMcCain or email them through their websites.

The defeat of the Graham-Cassidy bill is a relief and a testament to the millions of people who took action to oppose repeal efforts -- but we know that this life-or-death debate over our nation’s health isn’t done yet. Again and again, we’ve seen healthcare repeal bills fail, only to resurface once public attention shifts elsewhere. 

That’s why we need to position public health and community-based prevention advocates to be able to defeat the next attempt to roll back our healthcare gains. We need to tell the stories of our successful community-based prevention programs to our policymakers all year round – not just when a crisis hits. 

Our Media Advocacy Toolkit is a great place to start. It’s got tips for elevating your success stories with the media as well as sample talking points, op-ed pieces and more.