GOP leaders stumped by a two-question quick quiz

Today we have good interim news for President Donald Trump’s blue-collar working class voter base. We are talking here about all the true-believers who finally became fed up after years of being taken for granted by Washington’s elites and especially the Democrats, the party of labor they once thought would always be their protectors.

But first, we need to report that President Trump and the Senate’s Republican leaders are now wrestling with a two-question Grand Old Party quick quiz. It addresses what they thought they had solved earlier this week with their top-secret bill, which should have been named (if Washington was operating with truth-in-labeling) the Republican de Facto Income Redistribution Act of 2017. Instead, the Senate Republican leaders called it the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017. It’s their version of the House-passed scheme to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act that Republicans sneeringly call “Obamacare.”

By now, the Republican leaders have heard about the latest poll (by NPR/PBS Newshour/ Marist) showing a mere 17 percent of Americans approve of the Senate’s alternative. What happened was that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported the Senate bill would result in 22 million Americans becoming uninsured, while the House bill would leave a bit more—23 million people—uninsured.

Both bills would also significantly reduce federal funding for state-run Medicaid programs. Medicaid is widely assumed to mainly be the program that pays for health care basics for the poorest Americans. But what is littleis that Medicaid also pays for the care of a whopping 64 percent of all nursing home patients. That includes many Americans who were quite well off during their productive years (perhaps they even had memberships in Trump golf courses) but who spent all their savings as their health declined, necessitating moves into nursing homes.

Not surprisingly, the working class Americans who put their faith and votes behind Trump in 2016 have now figured out that they stand a painful chance of becoming part of the millions who lose their insurance coverage—and very possibly their parents could lose the Medicaid funding that pays for their nursing home expenses.

So Trump’s empty demagoguery about repealing and replacing Obamacare—and that of other Republicans they trusted—now sounds as hollow as it actually was all along.

So no wonder Trump and the GOP leaders are stumped by this quick quiz:

Q: How many Americans who trusted the GOP and played by the rules should be deprived of health insurance by their government that also now wants to give instant-cash gifts in the form of tax cuts to the multimillionaires who are the richest 1 percent of Americans? Should it be (a) 23 million people, or (b) 22 million people?

Q: And how many elderly patients who cannot care for themselves, and have nowhere else to go, should be cut off from the funding that allows them to live their last years in nursing homes?

All of that sounds like horrible news for everyone— especially those who trustingly voted for Trump but now seem especially vulnerable to these cuts. But the good news is that, most belatedly, Trump and the Republicans who constitute the Senate rank-and-file have gotten the word that their party’s draconian demagoguery about Obamacare’s problems has backfired, big league. In one of the classing blunders in congressional history, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who began this week insisting there would be a vote on his secret bill this week, got clobbered by the Senate’s tea party conservatives, who want the bill to be even more draconian, and the common-sense centrists and few moderates, who actually want to find a middle ground. McConnell, seemingly blindsided, postponed the vote.

And Trump, who once hailed the House version as a great bill, is now saying the House bill is “mean” and the Senate needs to find a solution with more “heart” in it.

McConnell stood in the White House driveway and described a worst case scenario in which the nervous markets would plunge and his party might have to negotiate with the Democrats. Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill, a half dozen of his Republican senators were calling for precisely that sort of bipartisan effort to fix what is indeed wrong with Obamacare—while preserving what is working.

Let’s hope these wise centrist Republicans will be able to lead their leader—before it is too late for us all.