The Republican Health-Care Lie Is Collapsing

[applegrove]

By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/the-republican-health-care-lie-is-collapsing.html

"SNIP.............

Medicaid is never going to be easy to cut, which is why the Senate bill back-loads its cuts far into the future, allowing current Republican officeholders to be insulated from their brutal effects. It is hard for Republicans to imagine a better chance to cut Medicaid than using the “collapse of Obamacare” as a cover.

Numerous Republican governors have denounced the deep Medicaid cuts in the Senate bill (which actually go even farther than the cuts in the House bill.) Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, all but calls out the bait and switch in the bill. “The country is looking for reform on Obamacare,” he tells Time. “That’s where the sole focus needs to be. This goes beyond that.” Ohio senator Rob Portman has expressed concern — perhaps pressured by his state’s Republican governor, John Kasich, who has denounced the plan.

Medicaid has split the party. Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania senator and former president of the Club for Growth, a lobby for extreme libertarian policy, has urged the inclusion of the long-term Medicaid cuts. Toomey reportedly lashed out at Portman. The Wall Street Journal, a longtime ally of Toomey’s plutocratic worldview, amplifies Toomey’s attack on Portman today.

When McConnell warns his party that the alternative to failure is bipartisanship, it sounds comical to outside ears. But he is deadly serious about it. He is telling conservatives that they are on the verge of forfeiting a historic opportunity to use the pretext of Obamacare repeal and replace to fulfill longstanding goals. The least committed conservatives in his party seem unwilling to risk their own popularity for these audacious goals. “If for some reason it fails … the floodgates would probably open to reach a bipartisan compromise,” West Virginia senator Shelley Moore Capito said on CNN. The term “floodgates” is telling. It indicates built-up pressure to abandon ideological maximalism and instead try to actually improve Obamacare.

McConnell is trying to use the urgency of a deadline to force through a law enabling his grandest ideological dreams. Instead, the pressure of timing may have opened up a schism within his party he cannot mend.


................SNIP"

[Gothmog]

1. The ACA is working

[Wounded Bear]

2. To the extent that the states let it work, yes...

Many red states refused the Medicaid expansion and dragged their feet on the exhanges, and they are the states with the worst outcomes vis-a-vis the markets and exchanges. Repubs have been trying to kill it through the death of a thousand cuts and people are suffering for it. The problem until now is that they have been successful in blaming the ACA for many of the problems they have perpetuated.