So, President Trump decided to become more actively evil. What a surprise. The question now is how evil the Republican party decides it’ll become in response.
For some impossible-to-discern reason, Trump suddenly decided he had to throw a firebomb under the health care bus. Actually, three bombs: yanking the payments to insurance companies to cover poor people, splitting healthy people out of the ACA marketplaces, and allowing insurance companies to discriminate out people with pre-existing conditions. Nice trifecta.
So this is simple sabotage, designed to make the system less fair, more expensive, and to cut the bottom out of the competitive market. So much for ‘Repeal and Replace’, or really, any Republican principle about open markets.
Why do we keep forgetting the ACA is the Republican health care system? Speaks poorly for us, since the ACA structure was designed by the Heritage Foundation and then built by Gov. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
What, you’re surprised? The Democratic solution was always single-payer, modeled after the successful systems used in most other advanced economies.
And Republicans molded the result. Republicans insisted that single-payer wasn’t just the wrong answer, it couldn’t even be an option. Republicans insisted that the open marketplace required that current insurance companies continue to make big profits. Republicans torpedoed all the suggestions for making care more efficient and cheaper.
Despite the changes, Republicans still insisted that this wasn’t their system, despite it clearly being their system. There was no rational reason to say that, because this wasn’t rational; it was simply and baldly political. Republicans had to deny Democrats in general – and Obama very, very, specifically – any victory. Obama touched it, and he worked hard to include Republicans, but that didn’t matter. If it helped people, that would be a Democratic victory.
(If Republicans are still unhappy being called ‘racist’, it might help if they didn’t do so many clearly racist things.)
The Republican measure of political goodness never counted how many people the ACA helped, or that their policies would hurt. It was that kind of political blink we’ve come to expect. The most ideologically pure Governors even turned down free Medicaid — help for the poorest people — because they knew that their people would come to expect the same level of mercy in the future.
Instead, Republicans carefully claimed lots of demonstrably wrong things — death panels! — where each new ‘fact’ required someone to lie about stuff they all knew was wrong. Again, being demonstrably wrong didn’t seem to matter.
So Republican spent years claiming that the ACA would be bad because it wasn’t really the conservative plan. They had to, they felt. We all knew that was a political lie, but Democrats, being completely hapless, didn’t push. Because Americans have the collective attention span of a gnat, it worked. Republicans got lots of applause and donations by demonizing the system they’d designed and then disowned.
Legislatively, Republicans are terrible parents.
Republicans famously repealed the ACA 42 different times on party-line votes. Great politics, I assume, which they could only do because they knew President Obama would veto each one. Even Republicans knew the repeals would be horrible policy.
Republicans campaigned in 2016 on “Repeal and Replace”, comfortable that they could continue their scam under Hillary.
And then, with Trump in front, they won the Presidency.
Oh, shit. And in Trump, they have a moron who either believes their lies, or (more likely) simply doesn’t care. He’s not a big ‘reality’ guy.
Republicans held votes anyway, but they were forced to admit that they didn’t have anything. They couldn’t cut the mandate. They couldn’t make it cheaper. They couldn’t make all the pain go away. They voted over and over, and breathed huge sighs of relief when each vote failed.
And now Trump bombs it, grinning idiotically. “Take that, Bob Corker!”
I wonder what Republicans will do with millions of people being hurt? I wonder if we’ll see another ‘Puerto Rico’ level of disaster?
