Best Thing Under the Circumstances

The Republican-led health care act was hideous, and we're better off without it. Someday we'll get the Federal government out of health care, but this didn't even pretend to do that. Someday we'll get to price transparency and fee-for-service instead of an insurance model, so we can have true markets. This bill didn't do that either. It didn't do anything I'd want done to try to fix the way we pay for health care, but it would have propped up all the worst features of the current system.

Hopefully the Trump administration learned that Congress is a co-equal branch that can't be just ordered to support a policy whether it makes sense or not. Failing that, hopefully at least Congress learned that about itself today.

They can take their time and get it right, or they can just repeal O-care with a one-year delay to give time for alternative solutions appear, either at the state level or from the market itself. Or they can do nothing and hope it all falls apart someday on its own, which would still be better than this. Under the circumstances, killing this bill was the best idea.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yup.

Glad it failed.
Still want ACA repealed asap.

-Mississippi

Tom said...

I don't really understand why this happened. It's a debacle.

ColoComment said...

Unlike the Dems in Congress, the Republicans don't march in lockstep. They have diverse proposals for addressing the situation, some of which are radical, others more moderate.
As I understand it, this first bill proposed to take on just the elements that are repealable under the lesser vote required under reconciliation (Senate: 50+1 votes), because without Dem participation, the Republicans don't have the votes in either the House (I could be wrong on this) or Senate for full & total repeal.
Thus, Ryan's plan to repeal what he could now, with the promise to get rid of the rest at a later date. Yeah, right. We've heard those promises before. If this had passed now, and given the likely FUBAR with just a partial repeal, the Republicans would have ownership of the result that everyone, but everyone, would hate.
I'm ok with this. The Dems still own OC, and also own their refusal to address its weaknesses.
I think Trump is right to move on to his other agenda items. ...following the First Rule of Holes.

ColoComment said...

I do so like Tom Cotton.... Fyi,

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/03/26/cotton-gop-health-care-not-feasible-release-bill-written-secret-expect-pass-18-days/