Today at 3:30pm the US House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. Whatever the outcome of the vote, the president is being sabotaged by Paul Ryan and other (((moderate))) Republicans.
Today
at 3:30pm the US House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a
bill to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.
Whatever the outcome of the vote, the president is being sabotaged by
Paul Ryan and other (((moderate))) Republicans.
Even
with the tweaks made in effort to appease conservatives, the proposed
measure will do little to alleviate the catastrophic and predictable
consequences of the current law. As long as the federal government
compels insurance companies to cover so called "pre-existing conditions"
it is impossible to have a private health insurance industry without
massive government subsidies. That of course, was the entire purpose of
the ACA in the first place. Democrats set out to destroy the private
healthcare market, with the intent of nationalizing it when costs became
so high that nobody could afford it. That collapse is upon us, and
whatever token effort the GOP makes to mitigate the damage, they will be
bailing out Democrats at the expense of the President.
Any
purported plan to have a second and third phase of the process will be
sabotaged by this fact. In order to pass more meaningful reforms, the
GOP will need to gain at least 8 seats in the Senate, and since most
Senate Republicans might as well be Democrats, we would realistically
need a lot more than that. This is going to be impossible when the
liberal media is fed millions of disaffected sick people who lost their
insurance subsidies. Every problem resulting from the passage of this
bill will have blame placed directly on the shoulders of President Trump
and congressional Republicans. Every resource at the disposal of the
Democrat party and other leftist institutions will be poured into
focusing on the perceived negative consequences of its passage, and
barely any Democrats will miss the opportunity to show up at the voting
booth in 2018 and 2020 to make their dissatisfaction known. In short,
the passage of this bill will directly result in the loss of Republican
political power, rendering impossible any attempt to pass greater
reforms in the future.
Rand
Paul seems to be about the only voice of reason on the subject, even if
his reasoning is a tad off. He suggests passing a bill to repeal
Obamacare, to the extent such a thing can be done through the
reconciliation process, bypassing the need for 60 votes in the Senate.
He then suggests a replacement bill should be voted on the same day, and
he seems to mistakenly believe this will result in a more conservative
outcome.
The
advantage of passing the repeal separately from the replacement is not
that it will result in a more conservative outcome, but rather that it
will compel the cooperation of Democrats. If Obamacare is repealed
outright, with no replacement at all, I predict that some number of
Democrats would be willing to vote with moderate Republicans on a
replacement plan that keeps such measures as the purpose defeating
compulsory coverage of "pre-existing conditions".
That
cooperation will serve as fuel for primary challenges against
congressional Republicans who would sooner vote with Democrats than
their fellow Republicans to the right. It also gives the impression of
bipartisan support, which some Americans are stupid enough to believe is
a positive. More importantly, it will mitigate the blame Republicans
take for the fallout, thereby preserving some chance of obtaining
greater majorities in the next two elections.
I
for one have a difficult time believing that any of this is lost on
Paul Ryan. He is sabotaging the Trump administration on purpose, the
same way he did when he called Trump's comments about a La Raza member "the
definition of a racist comment". For Ryan, this vote is a win-win.
Either the bill will pass, and its disastrous consequences will be
blamed on the president, or the bill will fail and the President will
look weak. The only thing Paul Ryan has to avoid in order to accomplish
his goals, is something that actually improves the conditions of the
American economy.
Our
only hope is that President Trump is already aware of this on some
level. One could imagine a shrewd negotiator like Donald Trump feigning
ignorance and playing the sucker right now, as a longer term strategy to
purge the GOP of saboteurs like Ryan at a later date. If Ryan tanks
healthcare reform now, few would blame the President for financing a
primary challenger in 2018, and we can all but guarantee a new Speaker
of the House as Ryan's last shreds of credibility fade from the minds of
the public.
No comments:
Post a Comment