It’s gotta have ‘heart’

“How do you like the [Senate health care] bill? Does it have enough heart, Mr. President?” President Trump was asked yesterday.

“A little negotiation, but it’s going to be very good,” he replied, whatever that means.

So far the man who thinks he invented “the art of the deal” hasn’t been able to pull even his own fractious Republicans together long enough to assure passage of some form of replacement for Obamacare.

The glory days of the Rose Garden rally following U.S. House passage of a bill are but a distant memory, after Trump privately labeled the measure “mean” — comments that quickly went public even as voter dislike for the proposal grew. And so Trump demanded of the Senate version something more “generous” with “heart.”

All of the usual Washington, D.C., wrangling is happening at a time when the choices for consumers in many states are drastically narrowing and the prices of health insurance rising at double-digit rates. Anthem announced this week it was pulling out of Wisconsin and Indiana in 2018. The company had earlier announced it was pulling out of Ohio next year as well.

One recent report by a health care consulting group looked at eight states and found companies looking for an average 18 percent rate hike. In Connecticut, Anthem is looking for an average rate increase of 33.8 percent.

So absent a solution out of Washington, Obamacare may collapse under the enormity of its own built-in flaws. And “heart” will require some solution.

Even here in Massachusetts the state is wrestling with putting the pieces of a once well-functioning pre-Obamacare system back together — and doing so knowing there will be less in the way of Medicaid funds in the future.

In that regard, the Senate bill is the marginally better one. And the only good news is that the feds may look kindly on waivers needed here to get us out of the hole created by Obamacare regs.

And what congressional Republicans will desperately need in the days ahead is a win, some evidence that they can indeed keep a promise and save a failing health insurance system from imminent disaster.