https://twitter.com/byrdinator/status/839882512511946752
So, this happened Thursday (and Ryan was trolled rather hard on Twitter, but, then, that always happens on Twitter)
(NPR) “This is the chance. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said the speaker, roving the stage with a wireless mic, gesturing at both the audience in front of him and the PowerPoint presentation behind him.
TED Talk? Late-night infomercial? Nope — it was House Speaker Paul Ryan, making a hard pitch for his health care plan after a week of loud conservative criticism.
After listening to conservative groups like the Club For Growth blast the bill as a “warmed-over substitute for government-run health care,” Ryan went on offense, saying this is just the first step of an ongoing overhaul of the health system.
Well, really, the GOP has two years to get it done before the 2018 midterms hit, at which point there’s always the possibility the GOP loses the Senate. They could sit there and craft a much better bill. Why won’t they?
The bill, drafted by Ryan and other House Republican leaders, cleared a key hurdle Thursday, passing two House committees after marathon markup sessions. But many members from the Tea Party wing are upset that it keeps too much of the Affordable Care Act in place and effectively replaces the law’s signature tax with a heavy surcharge assessed to people who forgo health insurance.
“There are only so many things you can do in that bill because of Senate floor rules, reconciliation,” Ryan said. “You can’t put everything you want in that legislation, because if you did it would be filibustered, and you couldn’t even bring it up for a vote in the Senate.”
This was not about convincing Democrats, who will be the party of no on any Ocare repeal and replace attempt….even though the mass majority who are left in Congress who voted for it have continuously refused to actually campaign on that vote…it’s about convincing Republicans. Many are still not biting.
Now, Ryan is correct on reconciliation. Here’s the problem: if this is the only way to get past reconciliation, what about the follow up legislation, such as for allowing health insurance across state lines? If it won’t work in this bill, how will it and the other ideas pass muster to get past the 60 vote threshold in the future?
Crossed at Right Wing News.
The NYT’s Krugman on TrumpKare:
How could House Republicans under the leadership of Paul Ryan, who the media keeps assuring us is a smart, serious policy wonk, have produced such a monstrosity? Two reasons.
First, the G.O.P.’s policy-making and policy analysis capacity has been downgraded to the point of worthlessness. There are real conservative policy experts, but the party doesn’t want them, perhaps because their very competence makes them ideologically unreliable — a proposition illustrated by the rush to enact this bill before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office can estimate either its costs or its effects. Basically, facts and serious analysis are the modern right’s enemies; policy is left to hacks who can’t get even the simplest things right.
Second, Republicans seem to have been undone by their reverse-Robin-Hood urges. You can’t make something like Obamacare work without giving lower-income families enough support that insurance becomes affordable. But the modern G.O.P. always wants to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted; so the bill ends up throwing away the taxes on the rich that help pay for subsidies, and redirects the subsidies themselves away from those who need them to those who don’t.
Given the sick joke of a health plan, you might ask what happened to all those proclamations that Obamacare was a terrible, no good system that Republicans would immediately replace with something far better — not to mention Donald Trump’s promises of “insurance for everybody†and “great health care.â€
But the answer, of course, is that they were all lying, all along — and they still are. On this, at least, Republican unity remains impressively intact.
— Paul Krugman
Go long on Enron.
–Herr Krugman