Finally, we are coming to a test of the true fealty of Donald Trump to his core voters: "Trumpcare," and if you don't think that the Democrats are going to hang that nameplate around Trump's neck, I think you are fooling yourself. He intoned all those calumnies about "Obamacare"--it kills jobs, it's a "disaster," and now, healthcare is "simple, but it's complicated," implying that he knows how to get it done--and pledged to repeal and replace it, and now the Republican House of Representatives...Donald's House...has come up with a plan. He should have been more careful what he wished for because, even if you only apply common sense to your appraisal of the plan, it will lead to the loss of affordable health insurance coverage for millions, maybe tens of millions, of voters. That's what the Congressional Budget Office, which is putatively non-partisan, says too. I guarantee that in the rear view mirror, Obamacare is going to look pretty good by comparison. Tax refunds of up to a few thousand dollars are going to replace subsidies, and they will be the only help low to moderate income people will get to pay for insurance they will have to chose and buy for themselves on the "free market." The decrement in the benefit inuring to those 20 million on Obamacare now, plus those made newly eligible for Medicaid--which the Republicans want to replace with block grants that the states tend to abuse as they did with welfare, by the way--should be an electoral hurdle over which the Republicans, including Donald Trump, cannot leap. The Republican creed that the free market is always best has always been a convenient mischaracterization of reality, and health care proves it. The free market for both insurance and medical care itself was what we had before the Affordable Care Act was passed, and it left more than 40 million people without any hope for personalized healthcare because doctors don't compete or barter for services and all those millions couldn't afford the price of meaningful insurance. The poor, both working and not, and the elderly not yet eligible for Medicare will suffer, and millions of them voted for Trump, Rubio, Ryan and McConnell. Now, they're going to get their oats, and they're going to get them from Trump, Rubio, Ryan and McConnell, among many others.
Of course, the internecine conflict within the Republican Party may prevent anything from happening anyway, regardless of the fact that the party has a majority in both houses of congress and paradoxically, that might be the best thing for the Republicans. They will blame Democrats for not filling in the gaps that the Republican heretics leave when they refuse to vote in favor of their poor substitute for what was at least a sincere attempt to provide universal healthcare. When the "Blue Dogs" did that to the Democratic ACA draft, the Democrats cut out the "public option," which was to be an alternative if the free market was too costly. The Blue Dogs went along and the ACA passed with just Democratic votes. But the conservative wing of the Republican Party is so recalcitrant, and the Democrats have been so thwarted by the Republicans, that there is not hope that the Democrats will pitch in, which the Republicans didn't when they were needed. And the conservatives won't budge. Flexibility isn't their long suit. So, unless they Republicans decide to essentially repeal Obamacare by defunding it, nothing is going to happen. And if they do defund Obamacare, tens of millions of people will be left with nothing, so their Republican bona fides will be confirmed, but they'll lose millions of votes because the common weal is a more powerful election motivator than party loyalty.
My guess is that Trumpcare will die on the vine, so to speak. There will be fulminations from the party leadership about having tried without succeeding because the Democrats didn't save them, but no one will buy that in the end.
There has been so much propaganda about the last election that people now believe that the Republicans swept the Democrats clean. However, the Democrat got almost three million votes more than the Republican in the presidential election. The Democrats cut the Republican majority in The Senate by two, and in the House of Representatives by six. That sounds like a clean Democratic sweep to me. You don't have to add much to that to make the Republican Party a footnote for the next twenty years. In short, this Trumpcare thing is going to work out just fine...for us liberals and Democrats, I mean.
Your friend,
Mike
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