Broken campaign promise
Humorist P.J. O’Rourke once summed up a typical American politician’s slate of campaign promises: “Vote for me, folks, and you’ll be farting through silk.”
If American voters were feeling particularly gassy in 2016, it was because of the steady diet of nonsense being fed to them by the presidential hopefuls. Hillary Clinton thought gender politics was enough to carry her to the White House. Poor Bernie Sanders supporters thought revolution was afoot and we were only a few Sanders spittle-infused arm waves from universal health care and free college.
But the huevos rancheros of all candidates was eventual winner Donald Trump, whose unceasing stream of impossible promises put all others to shame. He was going to be the one to ameliorate any problem any working American had. In fact, Trump was particularly effusive in his desire to scuttle the Affordable Care Act, which he called a “disaster” and a “disgrace.”
“It should be repealed and replaced, and if I’m elected we’re going to repeal it, replace it with something much better, much better and much less expensive,” Trump promised two weeks before the election. In doing so, he was simply recycling the overblown rhetoric of the Republican primary, in which candidates such as Ted Cruz promised to “repeal every word of Obamacare.” (A truly savvy GOP candidate would have promised to “burn the original bill, melt down the pen Barack Obama used to sign it, and shoot the press used to print it into outer space.”)
Yet when the House Republican plan was revealed this week, it looked far more like a standard pair of tighty whiteys than a pair of fine silk boxers. The plan leaves in place large swaths of the Obamacare framework, including retaining the requirement employers provide health care, the mandate that health plans must cover preexisting conditions and the provision allowing children up to 26 years old to stay on their parents’ health plans. It is a plan with no ideological underpinning that appears to have been stitched together by committee. Republicans appear to be willing to settle for “repair and replace.”
On Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan held one of his famous PowerPointstyle presentations in an effort to explain the plan. Ryan remarked that the “American Health Care Act” is “the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing Obamacare,” citing the Senate as a major restraint on what the House could expect to enact in the bill.
This is where the hot rhetoric of campaign season meets the cold water of legislative procedure. As Ramesh Ponnuru notes at National Review Online, the need to craft a plan that could pass the Senate heavily influenced the bill, including the mandatory surcharge of 30% for those who drop insurance and attempt to re-enroll when they need it.
Obviously, every bill is influenced by legislative procedure. But this isn’t what America signed up for, nor is it what Trump and others promised. For years, Republicans have expounded the need for portable health care untethered to one’s job. They’ve explained how com-
petition within the health care system was necessary to keep costs low and that private insurance is preferable to government dependency — yet this bill incentivizes states to sign up more people for Medicaid over the next three years.
For months, Ryan has had to wake up and eat a bowl of broken glass sent to him by Trump just so he could rewrite Obamacare; now his argument is essentially “it’s the best we could do.” It is the lesson that Americans will seemingly never learn — digesting legislative reality quickly turns an overblown campaign promise into a great deal of hot air.