Let repeal rest in peace
The law President Trump and Republican lawmakers deride as Obamacare could at this point be rechristened McCaincare, Collinscare or even Kimmelcare.
Graham-Cassidy, the latest attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act, officially expired Tuesday without so much as a vote, thanks in large part to the likes of Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine, who reprised their roles as the moderate conscience of their caucus, and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who was moved by his son’s congenital heart defect to, as he put it, take a break from “talking about the Kardashians.”
Nine months into the GOP’s total control of the federal government, the obsessive campaign to dismantle the ACA has succeeded mainly in expanding the ranks of its unlikely defenders in the face of grim alternatives. It’s a measure of the depth and illogic of this obsession that Republicans have yet to give it up completely.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who oversaw a grueling series of failed votes to undo the ACA in July, urged his colleagues to move on to tax reform but vaguely claimed that they were “not giving up” on health care. One of the champions of the latest bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, promised to return to it after “taking our show on the road” to build support. Some lawmakers were even pushing to tackle health care and taxes — a pair of “unbelievably complex” subjects, as the president once noted — simultaneously. And Trump maintained Tuesday that “there will be a repeal and replace.”
Rushed into consideration with just days left for approval by a simple majority before a procedural deadline, Graham-Cassidy would have replaced ACA subsidies and Medicaid funding with grants to the states, likely returning tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the uninsured. As McCain and others noted, it skipped the hearings and analysis typically applied to major legislation as well as any attempt at bipartisan support.
It also cut short an effort by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate health committee, to craft legislation that would actually address some of the ACA’s flaws. That remains the obvious way forward for senators who can bear to abandon their backward assault on Obama’s signature reform.