Archives for May 2017

Ross Douthat: “As written, the A.H.C.A. basically takes Trump’s gift to the party and hurls it off the highest possible cliff. It is not just the scale of the likely insurance losses, or how much the rich benefit from repeal relative to everybody else. It’s also the gulf between that reality and what Trump and various Republican leaders explicitly promised — insisting that their plan would deliver better coverage, lower premiums, and a lot of other things that have since taken a back seat to making room in the budget for more tax cuts.”

“When President Obama said — lyingly – that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,’ his party ultimately paid for it. A reasonably competent Democratic Party, with something like the A.H.C.A. to run against, should be able to make Republicans pay dearly in their turn.”

“Indeed, the A.H.C.A. should make the Democrats’ various internal dilemmas easier to resolve.”

Andrew Sullivan: “You might think Obamacare would violate my generally conservative principles, but it didn’t. In fact, it seemed to me to be an effective marriage of conservative principles and, well, human decency. The decency part comes from not blaming or punishing the sick for their condition. The conservative part comes from the incremental nature of the reform, and its reliance on the private sector to provide a public good. For good measure, it actually saved the government money, and it slowed soaring health-care costs.”

“The exchanges, with predictable early hiccups, largely worked — a case study in the benefits of market competition. The law allowed for experiments to test how efficient health care could be. It even insisted on personal responsibility by mandating individual coverage. And the concept of insurance is not socialism; it’s a matter simply of pooling risk as widely as possible. If any European conservative party were to propose such a system, it would be pilloried as a far-right plot. And yet the Republican Party opposed it with a passion that became very hard for me to disentangle from hatred of Obama himself.”

A top Republican emails Mike Allen: “I think the reality of the Senate process is setting in.”

“The legislation is likely to take a month or two to wend through the Senate. And Republicans are queasy about getting the likely result back through the House, then to President Trump’s desk.”

Playbook: “We’ve been talking to top House Republicans about the politics of this plan. Put plainly, there is a lot of concern. The politics around the AHCA are very tricky for the GOP. Many very senior Republicans were extremely unhappy with the celebration in the Rose Garden. The optics, they say, were horrendous. Of course, Republicans say they’ll be able to sell this plan to their constituents. They have promised their base that they would repeal Obamacare, and this makes good on that promise, they say. Midterms are base elections, and this could energize core GOP voters.”

For members: How Republicans Can Make Their Health Care Bill a Law

After Reuters published this photo of President Trump celebrating passage of the GOP health care in the House, CNN notes that 13 white men — and no women — are responsible for putting together a plan in the Senate.

Noted anchor Erin Burnett: “There are big medical differences between men and women.”

Politico: “The House Republican vote Thursday to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act means the GOP now has to answer for every problem with the health care law: the premium increases due to materialize this summer, more insurers leaving the markets, and regions where no one is willing to sell coverage at all anymore.”

“Democrats — who were blamed for every problem in the health industry, from rising premiums to overbooked doctor’s offices to long emergency room waits — couldn’t be more excited to give it to them.”