What matters: Headlines

We are burdened with a preposterously egomaniacal second-place president who is concerned mostly about the superficial appearances of his self-imagined grandiosity.

We are burdened simultaneously with a Republican Congress infested with Tea Party-era simpletons who profess to serve their constituencies by trying to blow up the government they’re supposed to make work.

And that’s precisely what happened to all that big talk about repealing Obamacare and replacing it with something great, and doing so on the first day of this preposterous new presidency, or in the first two weeks, or, at the latest, right away.

The megalomaniac in the White House and this Republican congressional infestation of ditto-heads didn’t do diddly.

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This president and those House obstructionists collided headlong as described in a ballyhooed Politico analysis that appeared over the weekend.

The article recounted that Trump met a few days ago with about 30 balking members of the so-called Freedom Caucus, meaning uncompromising and impractical right wingers. Some of the caucus members were concerned about the House bill’s leaving some of Obamacare’s “essential benefits” in place along with the community rating provision that limited what insurers could charge certain patients.

And Trump, according to Politico, dismissed those policy concerns by urging the congressmen to “forget about the little sh**.” The important thing, he said, was that the Republicans succeed in moving a bill—just a bill—out of the House.

Got that? These Tea Party types wanted to let insurers charge what they wanted to charge to whomever they wanted wherever they wanted and for whatever paucity of benefits they might be willing to provide. These Tea Party types hadn’t been sent to Congress to concern themselves with people’s pocketbooks and healthiness amid the free market.

And Trump’s response, essentially, was … who cares who pays how much and what gets covered?

The important thing to him was that he garner good headlines in those big newspapers he professes to hate. It was that he get hailed as a great negotiator on the cable news networks that enable his narcissistic personality disorder.

In the end, a bad bill got pulled down, not for the right reason that it was a bad bill, but because the rightwing simpletons thought it preserved too much Obamacare.

And it got pulled down because the egomaniacal president couldn’t sell the policy, because he knows and cares little about policy, and was exposed as seeking victory only for the sake of victory.

Naturally, Trump declared his failure, and his party’s inability to govern competently, as victory.

He did so by explaining that Obamacare remains in place, but is an unmitigated disaster that will become more of a disaster, with premiums and deductibles rising stratospherically. In that case, he surmises, Democrats will get blamed while he moves on to something that he can win for the most vital of reasons—appearances. Probably he’ll cut taxes.

In a healthy and functional political environment populated by a wellplaced statesman and leader here and there, a president declaring a program a worsening disaster would work in a bipartisan way to avert that disaster. He wouldn’t dare chortle about the worsening condition for the American people and the appearance of victory their pain will eventually deliver to his ego’s satisfaction.

He would want to be the president who fixed the predecessor’s program.

As someone insightful put on social media, Trump’s pronouncement is akin to a president’s saying that a war he inherited from his predecessor will only get worse and take more American lives, but that he will do nothing about that for now, because the public’s will to end the war will strengthen after a lot more American lives are lost.

Trump is saying he’ll get his ego-satisfying headline eventually if premiums will rise as much as he hopes.

Obamacare, as might be expected of any new system so vast and complex, is a mixture of successes—such as Medicaid expansion and a risen number of insured Americans delivering insurance remittances to struggling hospitals— and problems.

Mainly the problems have to do with the scarcity of insurance carriers and the absence of competitively priced premiums, mostly because many young Americans continue to ignore the federal mandate to get insurance and choose instead to eat whatever penalty is tacked on to their annual income-tax return.

When their only penalty for behaving as scofflaws is a lower refund, then their pain is not severe enough to change behavior.

A solution to that is not easy, either as politics or policy. But it is utterly beyond the realm of the possible when the president is on record not wanting to find it, but wanting to exploit the absence of it.