After weeks of secrecy, Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, the upper chamber's answer to repealing and replacing ObamaCare. Senate GOP leadership had been working on re-drafting the American Health Care Act, the House Republican bill, since it was passed early last month.

The bill scales back many of the health-care protections embedded in the Affordable Care Act, including stripping away the requirement that insurers cover 10 essential health benefits. Out of a 142-page bill, it took just 34 words to strip away maternity coverage, mental health treatment, and more:

SUNSET OF ESSENTIAL HEALTH BENEFITS REQUIREMENT. — Section 1937(b)(5) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396u–7(b)(5)) is amended by adding at the end the following: "This paragraph shall not apply after December 31, 2019.". [Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017]

The 10 essential health benefits protected under the Affordable Care Act that would be at risk under the Better Care Reconciliation Act are: pre-natal, maternity, and post-natal care; ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization, including surgery; mental health and substance abuse treatment; rehabilitative services, including those used to manage chronic diseases; prescription drugs; laboratory services; preventative services; and pediatric care, including oral and vision care for children.

You can read Senate Republicans' entire health-care bill here. Kimberly Alters

President Trump won 52 percent of Catholic voters in 2016, versus 44 percent for Hillary Clinton, Pew Research estimates. Now, Trump is losing the Catholic vote to Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 12 percentage points, 52 percent to 40 percent, according to a poll released Tuesday by right-leaving EWTN News and RealClear Opinion Research.

Biden would be the second Catholic president, after fellow Democrat John F. Kennedy, but American Catholics are evenly divided between the Republican and Democratic parties. Democrat John Kerry, the last Catholic nominee, narrowly lost the Catholic vote to George W. Bush in 2004, exit polls found.

"Catholic voters have emerged as perhaps the key demographic cohort in the 2020 campaign," says RealClearPolitics' Carl Cannon. This year they are "increasingly non-white, trending more liberal in their younger ranks, and intensely concerned about jobs, the coronavirus, and health care." They also prefer Biden's policies over Trump's, 53 percent to 41 percent, and favor Biden's temperament, 59 percent to 33 percent, the poll found.

"Similar to national tracking polls, Biden's standing — in many cases, a 20-plus-point advantage — among Catholic women, Hispanics, independents, and voters under 55 (especially millennials and Gen Z) make it very challenging for Trump to narrow the gap in the final days," said John Della Volpe, who directed the poll. EWTN News notes that Biden's lead "narrows significantly in the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin."

The poll also found that a 46 percent plurality of likely Catholic voters support the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Catholic, while the rest are either opposed (28 percent) or don't have enough information to make a judgment (27 percent). Also, 45 percent of Catholic voters favor upholding Roe v. Wade, while 25 percent want all abortion outlawed and 18 percent want it left to the states. "There is no gender gap on this issue and it's worth emphasizing that support for keeping Roe is high even among Catholics who attend Mass daily," Cannon notes. "Simply put, this election isn't about abortion. It's about the economy and the coronavirus. It's a referendum."

The ETWN News-RealClear Opinion poll was conducted Oct. 4-11 among 1,490 likely Catholic voters contacted online in English and Spanish. It has a confidence interval of 2.79 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. Peter Weber

Members of Congress have an expert Twitch streamer among them.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday made her Twitch debut for a live stream of the popular video game Among Us, which she held to get out the vote in the 2020 election. It was evidently a massive hit, as CNET reports her stream "peaked at 439,000 views, making it the third highest viewed single stream in history."

Ocasio-Cortez wasn't the only member of Congress on the stream, in fact, as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) also took part. This was just Ocasio-Cortez's latest foray into reaching out to her followers through the world of video games. Back in May, she got into the Animal Crossing craze and briefly opened her Twitter direct messages so she could visit other players' islands.

Ocasio-Cortez during the Twitch stream urged viewers to make a voting plan ahead of Election Day.

"Figure out if you want to vote early, mail-in, in person, day of," she said at the end of the stream. "Make your plan and stick to it. Thank you everyone so much for playing, and let's all participate in this election and save our democracy."

While this might have been Ocasio-Cortez's first Twitch stream, gamers can evidently expect her to return, as she noted, "I hope it's not the last." Video of the full stream is available to watch on Twitch. Brendan Morrow

Most people recover from COVID-19 within four weeks, but one in 20 patients is still ill after eight weeks and one in 40 continues to have symptoms after 12 weeks, a new study from Kings College London found, according to BBC News. The researchers pored over self-reported data in the COVID Symptoms Study app, looking for patterns that could predict if a patient who contracts the new coronavirus will have "long COVID" or recover more rapidly. They found several traits that appeared to increase the risk of longer-lasting COVID-19.

"Having more than five different symptoms in the first week was one of the key risk factors," Dr. Claire Steves at Kings College London told BBC News. Patients with a cough, diarrhea, loss of taste and smell, headaches, and fatigue would be at higher risk than somebody with just a cough, for example. People over 50 also had increased odds of long COVID, as did people with asthma or lung disease, and women.

"We've seen from the early data coming out that men were at much more risk of very severe disease and sadly of dying from COVID, it appears that women are more at risk of long COVID." Steves said. There are no set symptoms for long COVID, but fatigue is common, BBC News notes. You can find more examples in this new PSA on long COVID from Britain's Department of Health and Social Care. Peter Weber

"Joining me tonight is legend who has written over 3,000 songs, won 10 Grammy Awards, and has a new book called Dolly Parton: Songteller," Stephen Colbert said on Tuesday's Late Show. He asked Parton about the title of her book. "I really think of myself as a songteller, because I write songs but I tell stories in my songs," she said. Parton said loves singing and performing for her fans, "but there's just something about writing songs, it's just kind of like my personal time with God, you know. I don't need anything other than me and whatever instrument I'm using at the time."

Colbert asked Parton if she remembered any of the songs her mother used to sing to her, and she said yes, all of them. "Mamma used to sing all of those old songs brought over from the Old World," Parton said, "and so many of those songs were sad — and as I say, some of them just plum pitiful. But I remember many songs. There was a song she used to sing called 'Bury Me Beneath the Willow.'"

She sang it, a cappella, and Colbert teared up. "Oh, are you crying?" Parton asked in the middle of the song. "So I'd better hush before you cry yourself to death and we can't finish the show," she teased him at the end. Colbert laughed: "Like a lot of Americans, I'm under a lot of stress right now, Dolly. And you got under my tripwire right there." Parton said she and her mom would also cry when she sang those songs, and they agreed that crying is good for cleansing your soul.

"Everybody's got their favorite Dolly Parton songs," his being "Butterfly," Colbert said. "What are your Top 3 Dolly Parton songs?" Her top one was "The Coat of Many Colors," and there was also the deep cut "Down From Dover." And if we're going to be strict about it "Jolene" didn't make the cut. Watch below. Peter Weber

"The final presidential debate is just a few days away, and the organizers are trying to make sure it goes smoother than the first one," Jimmy Fallon said on Tuesday's Tonight Show. He wasn't convinced a mute button would tame President Trump, though. "If you mute Trump's mic, he'll just run across the stage and yell into Biden's," he said. So "it goes mute button, water spritzer, then lowering the podium into a hole in the ground," and if none of those work, the interrupter should get the helium voice. He demonstrated how that would work.

The Late Show celebrated the Trump mute button, and suggested a slime chute, in a reworded Simon & Garfunkel song.

The mute button is needed because "at the last debate, Trump interrupted Biden and Chris Wallace — and this is true — 128 times," The Late Show's Stephen Colbert noted. "While we're at it, how about a fast-forward button, just zip straight to Nov. 3? Now, this mute button won't be operational for the entire debate," just during two-minute answer periods, and to stop Trump from walking over to Biden's microphone, "the debate commission is also putting him on a child leash."

"The Trump campaign is not happy," Colbert said, "but ultimately, the mute button might play into Trump's new strategy" — or at least the one favored by his coaches — of not interrupting Biden, trying "to be more likable," telling jokes, emanating warmth, and also attacking Biden's son Hunter.

"Muting the mics, it's the same strategy my daughter's teacher uses for Zoom kindergarten," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. "Would a mute button even work on Donald Trump? I feel like if you turn off his microphone, he'll just pull another one out of his hair or something. Emperor Palpa-tan is very hot about the mics, he phoned into Fox & Friends this morning to lash out at the debate commission. This is what he does: Before every debate, every election, every interview even, he announces that they're plotting against him. ... How many months after he loses do you think Fox & Friends just stops taking his calls?"

"The debate commission says six topics will be covered on Thursday night — it's cute that they think topics will be covered," Kimmel said, and Trump's strategy this time is to appear nice, "try to be funny, and he's hoping a fly lands on Joe Biden's head." Watch below. Peter Weber

President Trump's "sprawling political operation has raised well over $1 billion since he took the White House in 2017 — and set a lot of it on fire," The Associated Press reports. Late Tuesday, the Trump campaign said it entered the final month of the campaign with just $63 million in the bank, far less than the $177 million war chest Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reported.

Trump and his shared committees with the Republican National Committee, which jointly raised $1.5 billion since the start of 2019, entered October with $251 million on hand, versus $432 million for Biden and his joint committees with the Democrats National Committee, The New York Times reports. What happened to Trump's once-massive cash advantage over Biden?

"They spent their money on unnecessary overhead, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous activity by the campaign staff, and vanity ads," like a $10 million Super Bowl commercial and $1.6 million in the deep-blue Washington, D.C. media market, anti-Trump veteran GOP consultant Mike Murphy told AP. "You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn't have burned through it as stupidly."

The Trump campaign spent significantly more to raise money over the summer than the Biden campaign, and raised significantly less money than Biden.

Other questionable expenditures include $100,000 on Donald Trump Jr.'s book, $39 million in legal and "compliance" fees, and at least $218,000 for Trump surrogates to travel on private jets provided by campaign donors, AP notes. Also, "since 2017, more than $39 million has been paid to firms controlled by [Brad] Parscale, who was ousted as campaign manager over the summer. An additional $319.4 million was paid to American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware limited liability company, whose owners are not publicly disclosed."

Trump's campaign insists it has enough money for the final leg, "almost three times as much as 2016," campaign manager Bill Stepien said Monday. But the campaign has canceled ad buys in Ohio, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, shifting resources to Georgia, Arizona, and Florida, Politico reports. Both campaigns are being aided by outside groups — GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson just poured $75 million into a new super PAC helping Trump — but fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg's $100 million investment to defeat Trump in Florida "has thrown Trump into a defensive crouch across the arc of Sunbelt states," Politico says, forcing Trump "to spend big to shore up his position and freeing up Democratic cash to expand the electoral map elsewhere." Peter Weber