Replace repeal with repair
Congress’ Obamacare repeal is, as John Cleese once said of an unfortunate parrot, no more, bereft of life, pushing up daisies. It has ceased to be, kicked the bucket and shuffled off its mortal coil.
Senate legislation to roll back tens of millions of Americans’ medical coverage under the Affordable Care Act had teetered on the edge of oblivion for weeks — delayed at one point so that a possible supporter, John McCain of Arizona, could receive health care for a blood clot. On Monday, the legislation officially lost the majority it needed to proceed. On Tuesday, an even less defensible bid to repeal the ACA outright, with no replacement in sight, fell apart in deservedly short order.
After scores of meaningless votes and countless vows to undo the law during the Obama administration, the resounding defeat of the “repeal and replace” campaign represented a belated, occasionally accidental triumph of basic sense and decency over callous and counterproductive extremism.
Moderate Republican senators such as Susan Collins of Maine and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, along with centrist GOP governors such as Brian Sandoval of Nevada and John Kasich of Ohio, helped block the legislation, which would have left many of their most vulnerable constituents without regular access to health care. An assist ironically came from conservatives who believed the bill would leave too much of the ACA intact. The implosion exposed the vast distance between overwrought anti-Obamacare rhetoric and the law’s largely salutary real-world impact.
President Trump, for whom this is what he might call a disaster, responded with an irresponsible tantrum vowing to “let Obamacare fail.” The trouble for him is that the law, for all its flaws, is not failing. Moreover, many of its difficulties — for instance the instability of some insurance markets — stem from the Republican obsession with attacking instead of improving it.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would serve himself and his country better by heeding Collins’ reasonable suggestion that the Senate hold hearings — which the majority leader has so far taken pains to avoid — on mending rather than ending the Affordable Care Act. Even McConnell has alluded to the possibility that Republicans would have to work with Democrats on such a project, which is a fine idea even if he meant it as a threat. Repair may well have the broad, bipartisan constituency that repeal lacked.