SENATE LEAVES HEALTH-CARE BILL IN A COMA
GOPers stymie Mitch & stall O’Care repeal
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday abruptly postponed a vote on the Republican bill to overhaul the nation’s health-care system after failing to swing enough of his GOP colleagues’ votes to get it passed.
McConnell (R-Ky.) pulled the plug after at least five fellow Republican senators indicated they would not even vote to open debate on the bill — but he later tried to put a positive spin on the delay, which will push any action past the July 4 recess.
“We’re optimistic that we’re going to get to a result that’s better than the status quo,” he said after it became clear in a meeting with GOP senators that he didn’t have the votes.
“Legislation of this complexity almost always takes longer than anybody else would hope. This is a big, complicated subject,” McConnell said.
President Trump sounded philosophical about the setback.
“This will be great if we get it done,” he said at the White House.
“And if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like. And that’s OK, and I understand that very well. But I think we have a chance to do something very, very important for the people of our country that we love.”
McConnell, who crafted the GOP bill behind closed doors with a dozen other Republican senators, wanted it passed before the recess, fearing that lawmakers on the fence would cave to pressure from angry constituents once they went home.
The GOP defections mounted after the Congressional Budget Office estimated Monday that the Senate plan would result in 22 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 10 years than would have had coverage under ObamaCare.
At least four conservatives and six moderates indicated they could not support the existing bill, and they were joined by three more GOP senators Tuesday afternoon: Jerry Moran of Kansas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Rob Portman of Ohio.
Conservatives opposed the bill because it did not go far enough to fully repeal ObamaCare and get the federal government out of the health-insurance business.
Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Ted Cruz (Texas) and others want changes that would let companies sell skimpier policies for less money and expand tax-free health savings accounts.
The moderates — including Susan Collins of Maine — said the bill as written would hurt their states because it capped the growth of Medicaid spending.
They want more cash to offset those reductions and more federal dollars for mental-health treatment for people addicted to opioids.
Some holdouts were not optimistic that changes would sway them.
“It’s hard to see how tinkering is going to satisfy my personal concerns,” Collins told reporters.
The defections came despite increasing pressure from the White House, with Vice President Mike Pence personally lobbying opponents, while the president summoned all 52 Senate Republicans to the White House for a meeting Tuesday afternoon.
Having delayed any vote on their ObamaCare repeal plan, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, until after the July 4 recess, Senate leaders better use that time to sell the bill to voters and their own nervous nellies.
Take the scary Congressional Budget Office estimate that 15 million people would “lose” their health insurance in the first year under the Senate bill. Read the fine print, and you learn that most of these are people (many of them younger and in good health) who will gladly cancel their insurance once they’re no longer legally required to buy it, and fined if they don’t.
Even better news, buried in the CBO scoring (or at least in most reporting on it): By 2020, premiums will be 30 percent less than under current law.
As for the conservative gripe that the bill retains too much of ObamaCare’s basic infrastructure: Sorry, guys, you don’t have the votes to pass a bill that fully obliterates it.
But the changes the bill does make are for the good — and that definitely includes the reform of Medicaid, the entitlement program that rapidly threatens to eat Americans out of house and home.
ObamaCare empowered a massive expansion of Medicaid far removed from its original concept of helping the ailing poor — to a level that taxpayers can’t contain. It now enrolls one in four Americans, with more growth ahead.
Yet the bill merely slows that growth. The nation is now spending nearly $400 billion a year on the program; over the coming decade, the bill would reduce the growth in outlays by a total of $772 billion.
But it does so by finally reforming Medicaid, a half-century after its birth, by replacing the old incentives for states to keep expanding it with ones that encourage innovation and efficiency.
The program was on track to disaster before ObamaCare made it worse. Republicans, having campaigned on reversing the downward spiral, can’t afford not to deliver.
Why not just wait until ObamaCare’s ongoing implosion grows undeniable? Because the damage will be worse by then, and Democrats still will escape most of the blame since Republicans have control.
Governing forces you to make tough choices — and doing nothing guarantees the voters’ wrath.