Trumps Health-Care Nightmare Is Only Just Beginning

[BeckyDem]

February 24, 2017

By Jonathan Chait



Eleven days before Donald Trump took office, I wrote a column with the slightly hedged but still hyperbolic headline “Obamacare Repeal Might Have Just Died Tonight.” While the “might” was doing a lot of work, my argument was that the GOP’s clearest and easiest path for repealing Obamacare had fallen short, which would force Republicans to attempt to forge a vastly more difficult path. That is what has happened since, and that is why the cause of repeal has been dying a slow and painful death. John Boehner — who repeatedly led his party to election victories on the promise that they would repeal Obamacare! — has now admitted repeal is “not going to happen” and “most of the framework of the Affordable Care Act” would remain in place.

Let’s back up and go through how this has happened. As soon as the immediate aftermath of the election, it could be seen that “repeal and delay” gave Republicans the easiest method for destroying Obamacare. The attraction of repeal and delay is that it did not require Republicans to cobble together majorities in both chambers to support any particular alternative plan, which — despite repeated promises and assurances of imminent success — they had failed to do since the legislative debate on health care began in 2009. Repeal and delay merely required finding 218 House Republicans and 50 senators to defund Obamacare on the premise that something, to be determined later, would be better.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/trumps-health-care-nightmare-is-only-just-beginning.html

[RDANGELO]

1. In other words

They can't come up with a decent health care plan without abandoning their ideology, that says you can't have any income redistribution.

[BeckyDem]

3. Pretty much. They're getting hit hard from some of their constituents. Most powerful was the woman

who said, my husband is dying. What kind of insurance do you have? This was to Tom Cotton, republican. Her poignant plea and question should become a slogan, directed at them all the time.

What kind of insurance do you have?

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/02/23/my-husband-dying-what-kind-insurance-do-you-have-gop-town-halls-erupt

[flamingdem]

4. Well stated in a nutshell

or you could say that the 1% wants theirs and they'll screw the working class to get them huge tax breaks

[Wounded Bear]

5. Obamacare IS their ideology...

It is a warmed over plan cooked up by the Heritage Foundation many years ago.

Then it was massaged a bit and voted in by Massachusetts under Gov Romney (yes, Repub Gov R)

Then it was massaged a bit more, had some progressive ideas like expanding Medicaid and closing the donut hole on Medicare Part D thrown in and passed as Obamacare.

They can't come up with a better plan because this was their best plan. Oh, and the individual mandate? That has been there from the beginning because you can't pay for it otherwise.

[dalton99a]

2. Kick.