i've been asking about this for a week
Posted on 03/26/2017 3:01:40 PM PDT by taxcontrol
In 2015, Congress passed Obamacare repeal. Now, a replica bill has sat unaddressed in committee since March 8th and there’s a path to getting it to a floor vote quickly.
The Trump spin mill has been in overdrive since House Speaker Paul Ryan pulled the abysmal first attempt of the new administration and Congress at the promised “repeal and replacement” of Obamacare.
The Trump administration and the media sold the American Health Care Act as the last best hope for repealing Obamacare, which is a complete joke. The idea that Republicans in the House and Senate, who have largely run on Obamacare repeal in the last seven years, would suddenly give up because a bad bill didn’t pass is absurd.
Since the AHCA was presented and recognized for the dud it was, there has been an incredulity that after seven years of doggedly campaigning against Obamacare, Republicans weren’t unified and ready with a bill to repeal it.
So, now what?
That’s what many in the Republican caucus and outside interest groups are asking following Friday’s events.
Many have astutely pointed out that Congress passed a repeal bill in 2015, so why aren’t they simply doing the same now?
Alas, unknown to many, a replica of the 2015 bill was introduced by Rep. Jim Jordan (R – Ohio) on March 8th, just two days after the disastrous AHCA.
Rep. Jordan, a member of the much derided House Freedom Caucus, reiterated the familiar words of many Republican candidates across the country just before introducing H.R. 1436:
“Our goal is real simple: Bring down the cost of insurance for working families and middle-class families across this country. In an effort to do that we think you have to get rid of Obamacare completely. So tomorrow I will introduce a bill that every single Republican voted on just 15 months ago – the bill that actually repeals Obamacare. Our plan has always been repeal in one piece of legislation and replace in the other. That’s right. The bill Rep. Jordan introduced earlier this month is a replica of the 2015 bill that passed in the House and Senate less than two years ago.
The bill has been languishing in committee ever since. However, there is one way it could move to consideration on the floor should an ambitious representative choose to take it on.
After a bill has been in committee for a certain period of time, a discharge petition can be circulated, which is privileged, to bring a bill out of committee and to the floor. But it must have a majority of the House. After the AHCA debacle that may seem unlikely, but consider the fact that this bill already passed in the last Congress. Repeal is the one thing a majority ostensibly agree upon.
There have been and will be endless autopsies over what went wrong with the AHCA, but one could insist that Republicans first post-Trump foray into Obamacare repeal didn’t have to go down the way it did.
Conservatives and the House Freedom Caucus took early blame for the AHCA’s passage or failure, even though moderates and the Tuesday Group became august denouncers of the bill as negotiations progressed. However, the HFC was asking for nothing less than what had passed in 2015.
“Conservatives expect nothing less than congressional Republicans to live up to their promises,” Jason Pye of FreedomWorks told RedState. “They passed this bill in the 114th Congress. Why can’t they do it now? This is the one aspect of this we all agree on, and it’s certainly a better option than the half-baked bill that leadership rolled out that didn’t really repeal ObamaCare.”
“But what about after repeal,” one might ask. “[H.R. 1436] gives us two years to work on a replacement that is grounded in real patient-centered, free market principles,” Pye stated.
What a sensible and prudent, but apparently novel, idea.
Rushing a replacement to Obamacare is asking for failure, as we saw with the AHCA. Pushing the bill through committee before the Congressional Budget Office gave it a score and having GOP leadership married to the bill already was poor planning, to say the least.
A clean repeal is what Republicans have been promising the American people for seven years. A clean repeal bill is sitting in committee, ready to go through the same process it breezed through in 2015 but in which the AHCA failed. As has been said before here, should Republicans fail to adequately reduce the cost of health care and increase access by repealing — and replacing to a degree — Obamacare, they will be seen as the biggest scammers in American politics for a generation.
The 2015 repeal bill is there, let’s pass it.
Lets start lighting up those phones people!
The thot plickens.
I want to see which republicrats wont vote to repeal( were they lying to us?). We were far better off before obozocare. If you don’t have insurance you have two options.1. buy some. 2. go to the ER!!
I wonder if they’ll have the cojones to run, yet again, on repealing Obamacare in the midterms.
RedState has apparently been declared safe for consumption again.
It’s the RINO / Arlen Specter strategy. Vote conservative when it doesn’t matter so you look conservative, then vote with the left when it’s critical.
i've been asking about this for a week
Recall and Replace... the GOPe basturds.
“Lets get the word out to our representatives”
Do we really have such people? Seems we go through the motions of acting as if we do every couple of years, and the people we elect join the royals, adopt socialism, attend Democrat butt-kissing classes, and stab us all in the back. All the while claiming, no matter if they have the majority of not, and even the White House, that our wishes are simply too complex and the Democratic agenda will have to prevail.
Our votes seem to be part of the bread and circuses program to keep us thinking our opinions matter.
Well, ok?
Have then bring it to the floor.
And who pays for the ER?
here’s what i think:
The enemedia and RINO NeverTrump articles about this so-called “failure” are all delusional, and the best part is that they actually believe their own delusions.
I heard President Trump say a few weeks ago that his administration wouldn’t be addressing obamacare repeal and replace until late 2017 to early 2018 (basically when obamacare would be facing complete collapse), so I can’t wait to watch these fools freak the F out when his administration introduces a REAL repeal and replace bill 9 months from now.
As far as President Trump was concerned, RyanCare was nothing but a red herring intended to take Paul Ryan out of all future equations about everything.
RyanCare was a real abortion of a bill, written by the insurance companies who were the only ones who were going to benefit from its passage. The insurance companies clearly had this bill already in hand, and I feel certain had cut a deal with Paul Ryan BEFORE the election, fully expecting HILLARY CLINTON to be President, but believing that some Pub House votes would be needed to get the bill through the House.
RyanCare was actually SUPPOSED to have been HillaryCare, which was why the original RyanCare bill preserved 99.9% of obamacare, and it supposed to have been Hillary’s gift to the insurance companies, while simultaneously shafting Trump’s voters, who are the people who would have suffered the worse under HillaryCare/RyanCare, with even higher premiums than we pay now.
Ryan went ahead with HillaryCare anyway, thinking he could bulldoze the House into screwing their own constituencies even worse than happened with obamacare. If this had passed, Ryan also knew that it would totally sink Trump’s ship before four years was out, which was another major goal of Ryan’s, namely, to try to destroy President Trump before 2020.
The Conservative Caucus saved Trump’s bacon whether he knows it or not.
i think the uninsured risk pool should be proposed separately as an FDIC type insurance to cover insco loses. Maybe teamed up with tort reform. Paid for by insco’s. The more individual people you cover the less insurance you pay in order to incentivise individual coverage. This could be privatized and not government run. It takes car of people who lose insurance from work place issue and allows to insco’s to provide catastrophic and or other types of coverage for people that don’t have coverage. totally private setup by law. just my opinion. there are tons out there.
We have had the ER rule of treatment for 40 years.The government reimburses the hospital. We don’t want people dead in the streets.Never have.But I assure you that was 10 times cheaper than Rinocare. I do not wish to have my premiums elevated for parasites or preexisting condition. No WAY. The great thing about the ER is you wait for 8 hours. If you are not happy with that, get a job and buy your own inurance policy. The constitution is not like Russian ‘s!! You have no right to have a car bought by me , or a house, or a nice vacation our a insurance policy. But your own ,if your want it or go to the ER!!
It WASN’T successful!! They know Obama would veto it - it was a dog and pony show. That’s exactly what it is now too because it won’t get the support necessary to pass.
It WASN’T successful!! They know Obama would veto it - it was a dog and pony show. That’s exactly what it is now too because it won’t get the support necessary to pass.
It was not a full repeal.
It was a reconciliation bill that repealed certain portions of certain paragraphs and subitems; a ‘partial’ repeal that could easily be reversed by a future democrat Congress needing no filibuster to resuscitate it.
A full repeal is about a page long. It is simply a law to take down another law. A full repeal renders the law it repeals so that it no longer exists on the books as a law.
A partial repeal leaves the original law in place even if certain portions of it are ‘repealed’ or more accurately, made ‘inactive’.
The 2015 reconciliation bill was touted as a ‘repeal’ but that was just Ryan pulling a gimmick so he could say he tried to ‘repeal’ it.
It was successfully passed out of Congress which is all that we can ask of our representatives and senators. Give President Trump the same opportunity to sign it.
Why didn’t they have this “successful” bill on Trump’s desk day 1?
Hint, it’s a farce.
I’ll bet anyone here $20 that it will never see Trump’s desk.
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