When Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, began laying out Republicans’ best course of action to repeal and replace Obamacare weeks ago he urged “humility” and “patience.”
“humility” and “patience” coming from the guy who lives in an area where Remote Area Medical must conduct multiple exercises each year trying to take care of the needs of his constituents.
Democrats don’t need an “alternative plan”. ACA is their plan. Maybe they can develop a list of fixes or tweaks that they’d like to see but the onus should be on Republicans to come up with a replacement since they are the ones trying to repeal what is already in place.
not in my lifetime
Once again, we underestimate how evil these people are. They will dismantle Obamacare ASAP… just watch. They do not care.
Republicans are counting on losing the majority in the House and Senate in 2 years. They want to repeal Obamacare now and leave the mess for the Democrats after the 2018 election. The Republicans know that they are nothing but fat white men on Viagra who can’t solve anything. Then in 2018 the Republicans will just filibuster any attempt Democrats make at solving the health care crisis that the Republicans once again will have created.
Trump has proven that Americans are stupid…for years we have seen that while we are #1 in Football and Military spending, we are at the bottom in academics among the 20 industrialized nation. This is exactly how the Republicans want it…an ignorant and under educated population is the Republican’s design for America.
Republicans have no intention of making the middle class great again.
Who needs reconciliation? What about a prompt, party-line vote?
This is the most advertised pre election policy change in history. It’s not something that can’t be fixed later. A filibuster is inappropriate.
Let them take healthcare away from 5 million bewildered Trump voters.
Their problem is that a majority of Americans don’t want the policies they are trying to advance.
Actually the ACA was the Republican plan, Romneycare = Obamacare, The Medicare for all (buy in option) plan with some drug / device price negotiating abilities of the VA system make sense for Dems to push hard now that the Repubs are putting Medicare contraction on the table.
We also underestimate how easily they can simply blame the resulting mess on Dems and have that stick.
TPM needs a copy editor. Marshall’s stuff is riddled with such errors.
Shorter GOP: If we vote to repeal but punt the damage three years down the line, surely the voters will have forgotten who did what when it starts to bite? And maybe the Dems will save our bacon.
Crippling ACA will kill thousands of Americans who would die prematurely. But most are Dem voters so the GOP wins!
Deplorable.
Can it be called governing when all they seem to do is take orders from business, big and small, and two bros from KS?
The main problem that has generated all of the illogical hate and resistance has been calling this Obamacare. The gerrymandered bloodsucking tea party members of the Freedom caucus and a lot of their saner brethren have been railing against anything associated with Obama since someone with that name entered the White House. They will continue to subsist on that hatred for a few more years as even their constituents who have social assistance of one kind or another join them in hating all things democrat/Obama/Federal. Eventually they have to replace that hatred with something new and improved once Trump assumes office and they are clearly running everything. This is a party that has run on hate, anger and obstructionism for so long now and have elected people that represent nothing but that feeling that the majority of them have forgotten how to actually govern. Our fate is in the hands of the few sane people in Washington now, and I am afraid that may be way too little of a force to actually protect us from the crazy. Yesterday a maniac shot up a pizza store because he thought Hillary Clinton was running some kind of child sex ring out of it. How long before our new president and his totally whacko NSA sends in the National Guard to a mosque reported by infowars to be kidnapping white children and selling them into slavery in Iran? Are these people actually capable of policy in the traditional sense of the word anymore?
Of course, we all know the GOP doesn’t really want to replace obamacare with something better or something that actually works “to help people”. Thus, reporters need to ask followup questions about the legitimacy and wisdom of repealing something BEFORE a consensus plan is agreed to. They should pointedly ask what will happen if there is no consensus in a couple of years after the repeal. And, they should also ask if republicans even have a consensus plan that they could agree to. Maybe they should ask if there is a better plan than obamacare, what would it look like. Quit letting the GOP get away with bad governance.
The Democrats need to get on this quickly and with focus. They need to do what the Republicans did to them with great success - develop a message and keep driving it home. This is a perfect issue to establish early on the prism of political fraud through which voters should view everything coming down the pike.
The Republicans have been railing against Obamacare for 6 years. They voted to repeal it about 40 times. Literally. There’s no excuse for not having an alternative ready to go - unless it was all fraudulent political theater with peoples’ lives in the balance.
The longer the Democrats wait, and the more muted the response, the harder it will be to combat the Republican lies and deceit we all know are coming.
After all the years of Republicans railing against Obamacare, we need to go back and focus on what their problem with it really is. There was that it would kill jobs, but after a 4.6% unemployment rate that loses it’s punch. There was that their was “death panels”, but so far no panel has met to decide anyone should die. Anyone remember the rest of their objections?
This is the key question since the election puts Republicans in the WH and with majorities in both houses of Congress. Can they govern?
They have painted themselves into a corner with scorched Earth rhetoric and tactics. Their base expects them to follow through with a quick repeal. Yet, Ornstein is right, they have shown no ability to coalesce around a workable replacememt plan.
It will be interesting to see if the imperative of being forced to own the results will “break the fever” as Obama said. Like most here, I remain skeptical.
If a single Democrat collaborates in this evil three years down the road, they need to be primaried, even if it means losing the seat forever.
Trump claimed he would replace obamacare with a better plan that would make medical care cheaper. These guys need to be pressed and pressed for how they would do it. Repealing and waiting a couple of years to come up with a plan is bullshit. every reporter needs to say, “Well, maybe you won’t be able to come up with a better plan in 3 years if you haven’t thought of one yet.”