Obamacare Repeal Is Failing Because It Was Based on a Lie

[DonViejo]

By Jonathan Chait

February 7, 2017
8:00 a.m.

Last week, Richard Hanna, a Republican from central New York who just retired from Congress, admitted something that almost no member of his party in elected office has been willing to concede in public. “At the end of the day, the Affordable Care Act will in some form survive, and the millions of people who are on it will have insurance,” he said. “It’s something this country needed and something people want. Politically, it’s untenable to just wipe it away. So who really won? In my argument, the president, Obama, won. At the end of the day we will have some sort of national health care that’s going to look very similar to what we have.” The mania for destroying the law is faltering because the Republican crusade to kill Obamacare was always based on delusions that are no longer possible to conceal.

In the aftermath of the presidential election that handed them full control of government, Republicans quickly converged on a plan to execute their longtime battle cry of repealing Obamacare: They would immediately repeal the law, perhaps even signing the bill to do it on Inauguration Day, after which they would have leverage over shattered Democrats to force the opposition party to supply votes to pass whatever the majority came up with. Since that point, they have moved steadily backward.

In early January, several Senate Republicans indicated opposition to repealing Obamacare without a replacement — enough defections to kill repeal, given that the party can only lose two Senate votes. The plan to quickly repeal, and then figure out a replacement, appears to have been halted, and the party has yet to decide what will take its place. A week after the inauguration, a secret recording of a Republican Congressional brainstorming session revealed the party had not advanced beyond step one in conceptualizing a plan, let alone achieving consensus on any of the numerous dilemmas they would need to resolve. “We’re in the information-gathering mode right now,” says Representative Mark Meadows. At the current trajectory, sometime next week, a Republican staffer will Google “What is health care?”

In an interview Sunday with Bill O’Reilly, President Trump conceded that health care was “very complicated,” and floated a timetable for devising a replacement that could extend into next year:

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/obamacare-repeal-is-failing-because-it-was-based-on-a-lie.html

[Phoenix61]

1. They were counting on Dems to roll-over

and not counting on voters to become very vocal about what would happen if they were left high and dry without insurance.

[AlexSFCA]

2. it's not about obamacare

republicans don't have an issue with obamacare per se. In fact, the ACA is a republican idea. They simply wanted to demonize it and use it against obama. It worked. What do they do now? For all I know they may introduce some tweaks (no state lines, etc.) to reduce costs and call it something else.

If they fully repeal without suitable replacement, then it may give us a better chance in 2018. After all, obamacare is the least of our problems because it can be reinstated as long as our democracy is intact.