 Sen. Bill Cassidy speaks with reporters as he leaves the Senate chamber. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters) By Carolyn Y. Johnson Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) vividly remembers his worst day as a doctor. His patient, an 18-year-old woman with hepatitis B, needed a liver transplant, and he arranged to have her airlifted to Shreveport for the procedure. "I was sitting there thinking, if we had vaccinated this girl with a $50 vaccine, we could have saved a $250,000 operation and a lifetime of $50,000-a-year medical bills," Cassidy recalled in a recent interview. There's a happy ending to the story: The patient's liver began to recover, avoiding the need for a transplant. But Cassidy didn't know that as the helicopter took off. He was motivated to set up a vaccination program to prevent the infection. Over six years, 36,000 schoolchildren in his state were vaccinated. Cassidy has been in the spotlight recently as one of the holdouts on the current version of the Senate health-care bill, because of his concern that people may not have access to affordable and adequate health care coverage. He has authored his own proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act and has suggested that whatever replaces that law needs to pass the "Jimmy Kimmel test" — a term he coined after the late-night host told a moving story about his newborn son's heart condition and pleaded for a bill that would not allow discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. Cassidy's experience as a doctor gives him an unusual perspective among politicians when thinking about health care. And the dilemmas states are likely to face if Medicaid's federal funding is cut are already hitting his state in its decisions on how to treat Medicaid patients with hepatitis C, a liver-ravaging virus for which there are now a handful of very effective, expensive treatments. | 
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