Why Trumpcare failed
With a whimper, the incoherent monstrosity that was the American Health Care Act ran into a ditch yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives. Its inevitable downfall at the hands of President Trump’s own Republican Party, leading to Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan yanking the bill from the floor, was an unprecedented setback for the first major legislative push of a new chief executive. This defeat has many fathers. Its yugest is Trump himself, saddled with ideological incoherence, inattention to detail and a high-handed leadership style.
As a candidate, he ran railing against the “disaster” he called Obamacare, but offering not even a sketch of how he might improve it. It would be replaced by something “terrific,” he said repeatedly.
As President-elect, Trump pledged that his plan would provide “insurance for everybody” with “much lower deductibles.”
But what Trump two weeks ago praised as “our wonderful new healthcare bill” was a desperate attempt to cling to Obamacare’s many popular provisions while offering the semblance of a conservative replacement for others.
It would not provide insurance for everybody; a nonpartisan analysis projected it would take it away from 24 million people.
It would not reduce premiums; in the short term, it would increase them.
It would not lower deductibles; under it, deductibles would rise.
In truth, Trump cares not a jot, not a tittle, about the details of health policy. Last month, he expressed genuine surprise that the subject “could be so complicated.”
As the vote approached Friday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump had done everything in his power to get the bill through. In fact, he did not once make a strong, principled case for its passage to the American people.
Enter the second father of the ignominious defeat: House Republicans, led by Ryan. Consumed by loathing toward all things Obama, they voted dozens of times over seven years to repeal his health law rather than honestly reckoning with its fixable flaws.
They never came to terms with the model that would replace it.
And so, their attempt at a consensus overhaul fused together the competing if not incompatible impulses of moderates, who winced at the damage dramatic reform would do to the elderly and the poor, and conservatives, who yearned for a pure and fantastical remaking of American health care along free-market principles.
Dealmaker Trump, winner Trump, proved pitifully incapable of bridging the divides. As the votes slipped away, his threats, blame-shifting and petulance further marred a lame display of leadership.
The final fathers among many: Reps. Chris Collins and John Faso, whose naked bribe to relieve upstate New York counties of Medicaid costs would have piled billions of dollars in fiscal burden on the backs of New York City taxpayers.
It was a nail in the coffin of a corpse that has no business coming back from the dead.