No amount of tweeting can alter the fact that Trump’s health plans are a total mess
THE Twitter frenzy was to be expected. Donald Trump’s fingers and thumbs started working furiously on Monday night and he was at it again at breakfast time.
He has discovered that trying to get the Republicans into line on health is rather like herding cats. Over the past few days, the number of recalcitrant moggies has increased and a flagship Trump pledge looks as if it has bitten the dust.
Republican opponents divide into two camps. On the free market right, led by Rand Paul, are senators who believe that insurers should be free to offer whatever policies they wish without interference from the federal government.
The best analogy would be pet insurance, where companies offer a wide array of cover, ranging from the comprehensive to the negligible.
Though there are subtle nuances between them, this is more or less the vision of Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee of Utah, the latest to break ranks.
On the other wing, there are moderates such as Susan Collins of Maine, who fear that the free market approach would leave the old, sick and poor without insurance.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had voiced misgivings, as had Rob Portman of Ohio and Dean Heller of Nevada. But it was Jerry Moran from Kansas, apparently not one of nature’s rebels, who stuck his head over the parapet to help trigger the bill’s collapse.
“It’s total meltdown on the Republican side,” says Congressman Peter DeFazio. “As a Democrat, it makes my day. But repealing health care without a replacement will take insurance away from millions of Americans – it’s a disaster.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation fears that the impasse and partial repeal would be the worst possible outcome for insurers, who would be left covering the old and sick but without the income coming in from the young and healthy.
Mr Trump hopes that pressing the nuclear button on health will knock heads together and, with the clock ticking, force the Democrats to come on board for reform.
There is a logic to this, given that any bipartisan bill is unlikely to be starved of funds for nakedly political reasons. Democrats have long accused the Republicans of deliberately undermining Obamacare by choking off the cash it needed.
Arguably – given a clean bill of paper – a majority could be concocted for some sort of health legislation. In a letter to constituents, Susan Collins hinted as much when she called for a bipartisan approach. A couple of weeks ago, two senators – Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, and Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana – appeared on ‘Meet the Press’, one of the Sunday political talk shows in the US. Intriguingly, they appeared to agree on a fair amount.
But there are several very large flies in the ointment.
Setting a two-year deadline to reach an agreement might concentrate minds, but it would also create chaos in the insurance market, which inevitably would see the costs spiral. This would not do the Republicans any favours in the mid-term elections next year.
Theoretically, a political consensus uniting Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans could produce a bill in the Senate. But the snag is that such a bill would, in reality, be a reworked Obamacare, which would almost certainly get bounced by the House of Representatives.
The measure would infuriate conservative right-wingers, who have already started turning their fire on Republican senators who they believe are not showing sufficient resolve – notably Dean Heller in Nevada, who has been blitzed with attack ads from a Trump-supporting SuperPac.
But the smart money in Washington suggests that things are unlikely to get even that far, with many questioning whether there are enough votes in the Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
In short, it is a mess, and tweeting furiously is not going to make things any better. (© Daily Telegraph London)
It’s a meltdown on the Republican side but repealing health care with no replacement is a disaster