Obamacare fail splinters GOP
After seven years of assailing health act, Republicans wonder where to go next
Never mind.
The GOP’s sevenyear promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act appeared to end Tuesday, at least for the time being, with Obamacare intact and Re- publicans in disarray.
For four successive congressional campaigns, Republicans exploited frustrations about the Affordable Care Act with considerable electoral success, and the GOP won the White House last November with a gauzy promise by candidate Donald Trump to replace it with something “beautiful.”
Six months later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled the repeal-and-replace bill from consideration late Monday in the face of certain defeat. Tuesday, his backup plan to repeal the law now and work out a replacement down the road — a proposal congressional Republicans approved two years ago — also seemed doomed as a trio of GOP senators quickly announced they would oppose it.
McConnell said he plans to bring it to a vote next week anyway, but other Republicans — even Trump — seemed ready to give up. “I think we’re in that position where we’ll let Obamacare
fail,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday, acknowledging that he was “very disappointed” by the bill’s demise.
For years, opposition to President Obama’s signature initiative, enacted without a single Republican vote, united GOP ranks even as trade, immigration and other issues divided them.
The stalemate in their efforts to reverse the law raises questions about the effectiveness of the party’s leadership in Congress and the White House.
It was one more rude lesson in the realities of governing for Trump, who has yet to score a single major legislative victory during his bumpy tenure.
Many of the middle-class and working-class Americans who were crucial in the president’s upset victory dismissed the cloud of controversy over alleged Russian meddling in the election and what role his associates might have played.
Strategists in both parties as- sumed those voters were more concerned that Trump deliver on promises closer to home: to bring manufacturing jobs back to the heartland and to make health care more affordable for their families.
The GOP-controlled Congress, facing a guaranteed veto, voted dozens of times to repeal the Affordable Care Act when Obama was in the White House. Before his inauguration in January, Trump bragged that the Republican replacement plan was “very much formulated, down to the final strokes.”
When the votes mattered, passage was undercut by concern among some conservatives that the new version didn’t go far enough to repeal Obamacare and among some moderates that cutbacks in the Medicaid expansion that was part of the law would hurt their constituents, from Maine to Alaska.
Despite his skills as a legislative tactician, McConnell was unable to negotiate a compromise that would stitch together that coalition. That leaves complicated questions about what exactly can or should be done to address strains in the Obamacare exchanges that have increased premium costs and limited insurance choices for millions of Americans who rely on them.
Trump’s conclusion is to simply let the system implode.
For voters, that may be a hard sell when Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. Democrats could teach them about the cold realities of controlling all the levers of government: Blowback from passing the Affordable Care Act helped cost Democrats control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Some Republicans fear the failure to repeal the ACA could cost them control of the House next year.
Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, another member of the GOP leadership, said: “We need to find out where the votes are, but there are other things we need to do, too.”