Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, March 24, 2017

Round Two Of Healthcare Thunderdome

Today, the GOP demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that they are unfit and unable to govern.  In some ways this is the perfect marriage of Trump and Ryan.

However, the fight over the ACA isn't over.

Trump is nothing if not a vindictive prick.  It's essentially his defining characteristic. He is now vowing to destroy the Affordable Care Act markets.  Tom Price could grant every manner of exemptions to Red States to create dysfunctional markets, presumably they could work actively make the markets worse and slow walk any easy fixes.

The assumption is that if the Affordable Care Act implodes, this will hurt the Democrats who wrote the law.

This fundamentally mistakes how low information voters process events and make decisions.  If their health care sucks, they will blame the President - especially the President who promised them "the best healthcare" and then spent a month defining his presidency with the Shit Sandwich Healthcare Act of 2017.  It doesn't matter the intricacies of policy making in DC or how the markets are being regulated or the feasibility of insurers to offer good premiums in rural markets.

Republicans run the government.  Republicans will get the blame.

Some Republicans - especially at the state level - might begin to work within the framework of Obamacare, now that Obama isn't president.

But the fight over this bill isn't exactly over.  It will remain on the books until a Democratic President and Congress can fix it, but the GOP hasn't finishing swatting at this particular pinata.

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