While attention is focused elsewhere, just 13 Republicans in the Senate are drafting a health care plan in total secrecy, with no committee hearings planned. This suggests that the plan is going to be a real stinker and that they are planning to ram it through before the details can sink in and there is a popular uprising against it. The media are helping by not highlighting the secrecy and simply ignoring the plan altogether until it is revealed.
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At a town hall meeting in New Jersey, a voter named Geoff Ginter gives an earful to his Republican congressperson Tom MacArthur for drafting and voting for the amended Republican health care bill. This kind of heated meetings have become commonplace but this one is exceptional because Ginter provides a passionate and articulate attack on the bill and an insightful analysis of what is wrong with the system in the US. I was highly impressed that although he was clearly extremely furious, he did not let his anger take over and lose control. He was very lucid and coherent and the congressperson had to just stand there and take it.
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After the humiliating debacle in which Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had to pull their health care bill from the floor or see it go down in flames, the talk was that the reform effort was dead, at least for some time, and that Trump and Ryan would reluctantly defer health care actions that hurt the poor and middle class and instead move on to other things dear to their hearts that hurt the poor and middle class, like cutting taxes on the wealthy.
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Well, that was a surprise. I did not expect to see the Trumpcare bill crash and burn as it did yesterday when the speaker Paul Ryan pulled it from the floor of House of Representatives shortly before the scheduled vote because he did not have the votes to pass it and wanted to avoid an embarrassing defeat, although the effective defeat is being seen as equally devastating. I thought that too many factors were in favor of some version of it passing.
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There has been high drama about the Trumpcare (aka ACHA) health bill introduced to replace Obamacare and whether it will pass both houses of Congress despite Republicans having majorities in both. Yesterday’s deadline for a vote, set for the stupid symbolic reason that it was the seventh anniversary of Obamacare’s passage, came and went without a vote and another deadline has been set for today.
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The replacement plan for the existing Affordable Care Act, called the American Health Care Act, has been rolled out by Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. It is abundantly clear that it is an assault on the poor that the main winners are the rich, particularly the very, very rich. This plan has enabled Ryan to finally unleash his inner Ayn Rand, of whom he is an ardent devotee and his love for whom he has tried to conceal up to now.
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The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has released a report that shows why the Republicans are so eager to repeal the Affordable Care Act even if there is nothing to replace it with. The reason is not surprising: it would result in a huge tax cut for the wealthy, which is the only thing that matters these days.
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