President Donald Trump made one of his most explicit threats to cut off payments to insurance companies to force senators and lobbyists back to the bargaining table for a GOP health-care bill, and saying, for the first time, that he was also willing to cancel some of lawmakers’ health-care benefits.
“If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!” Mr. Trump tweeted Saturday.
. . .
It was the most dramatic night in the United States Senate in recent history. Just ask the senators who witnessed it. A seven-year quest to undo the Affordable Care Act collapsed—at least for now—as Sen. John McCain kept his colleagues and the press corps in suspense over a little more than two hours late Thursday into early Friday. Not since September 2008, when the House of Representatives rejected the Troubled Asset Relief Program—causing the Dow Jones industrial average to plunge nearly 800 points in a single afternoon—had such an unexpected vote caused such a striking twist.
. . .
“Repeal and replace” made Republicans electoral Supermen, but “pre-existing conditions” were their kryptonite. Senate Republicans played out the final scene of their legislative tragedy in the early hours of Friday morning when they formally laid to rest their seven-year effort to repeal the law. Through four election cycles, Obamacare’s rising premiums, burdensome cost-sharing, narrow networks, and plan cancellations helped fuel GOP electoral victories at every level of government. The failure suggests why the political consequences are likely to be deep and long-lasting.
. . .
The GOP cannot simply “move on” and give up on health care. Health care is the biggest driver of our debt and deficit, the biggest driver of growth in government, and one of the biggest drivers of economic insecurity for those in the middle class and below. Take some time to reflect, yes. Come up with a better strategy, yes. But to give up on health-care reform is to give up on everything conservatives stand for.
. . .
After 20 of the 24 Obamacare non-profit health insurance cooperatives collapsed, despite the influx of $2.4 billion in taxpayer funds, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that its trade association would also fail.
The National Alliance of State Health Cooperatives (NASCHO), the Obamacare co-op health insurance trade association, has quietly closed its doors, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned.
NASCHO once represented as many as 24 Obamacare non-profit co-ops that were intended to compete with for-profit commercial health care insurers and perhaps even drive them out of business. The Obama administration underwrote the experiment with $2.4 billion in long-term, low-interest loans.
. . .
It’s pretty hard to get a head start on President Trump in trying to shift blame onto others for the late night culmination of massive political failure in the presumptively Republican Senate. But let’s provide a short report from the medical examiner on the causes of death to the once soaring rhetoric and more recently depressing reality of “repeal and replace.”
- Yes, the procedural minefield through budget reconciliation was narrow, murky, and treacherous. But even the entire inventory of legislative tricks, gimmicks, and sidesteps attempted still needed to be anchored to a larger commitment than just avoiding political-party embarrassment.
- Republicans in Washington never met the challenge of offering a sufficiently unifying message to constituents that all the uncertainties and sacrifices immediately ahead from disruptive changes were aimed at actually making their lives BETTER eventually, rather than just not quite as bad as a host of maladies and calamities attributed to Obamacare…
. . .
Weeks ago, President Donald Trump tweeted, “As I have always said, let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great health care plan. Stay tuned!”
And indeed, the system established by the Affordable Care Act is collapsing on its own. Average premiums are up 105 percent since the health overhaul law took effect, and premiums will soar again next year, based upon early announcements. That will drive more young and healthy people away, further destabilizing the health insurance markets.
People in 40 percent of U.S. counties risk having only one “choice” of plan next year, and some may have none as insurers flee the market because of heavy losses.
. . .
Senators who walked off the floor around 2 a.m. Friday after the stunning defeat of the latest GOP ObamaCare repeal effort face tough questions on how to move forward.
GOP leaders sounded pessimistic notes that the failure would lead to compromise or bipartisan work on healthcare, though some members said they hoped it would spur leaders to start a more formal process of committee work after months on Senate bills being drawn up behind closed doors.
“We’re not adverse to that,” said Sen. John Thune, the No. 3 Republican leader. “I just don’t have high hopes that we’re going to get anything that really solves the problems that we think exist with ObamaCare today.”
. . .
Shortly before 1:30 a.m. Friday, McCain strode to the well of the Senate, and gestured his hand downward to vote “no.” Stunned gasps echoed throughout the chamber.
“I thought it was the right vote,” McCain told reporters as he left the Capitol. “I do my job as a senator.”
It was a shocking — yet fitting — coda for the Senate’s health care battle, starring the veteran senator with a well-polished maverick streak. Within days he went from Obamacare repeal’s savior to its executioner.
. . .
The Senate in the early hours of Friday morning rejected a new, scaled-down Republican plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, derailing the Republicans’ seven-year campaign to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law and dealing a huge political setback to President Trump.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, who just this week returned to the Senate after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer, cast the decisive vote to defeat the proposal, joining two other Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in opposing it.
. . .