Trump/Ryan care was a crap sandwich.
Full Repeal bill has already passed both the House and the Senate. It has already be reintroduced. The only reason it doesn’t come to the floor in the future is because someone Ryan or Trump blocked it.
Purists Kill Whatever They Believe In>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The HFC are not purists. The wanted a bill for the People, not for the Insurance Companies and Big Pharm. Ryan’s bill was like an expropriation bill, instead of real property it was expropriation of peoples wallets, a handover to the Insurance Companies who ruined private health care in the first place.
Nothing purist about wanting a free market of Health Insurance, without government interference.Its what America expects.
The Freedom Caucus members opposed a bill that had the support of 17% -- yes, that's SEVENTEEN percent -- of the American people. They were not "purists" at all. They recognized a political disaster for what it was.
Donald Trump actually came up with a seven-point health care reform plan during the 2016 campaign. Ryan's AHCA bill was a pathetic mockery of that plan -- containing NO provisions that actually reflected any one of those seven points. The AHCA was also such a weak and ineffective bill because Ryan claimed that it had to be this way in order to pass in the Senate where 60 votes would be needed to pass a true repeal of Obamacare. This directly contradicts what Ryan himself said in early 2016, when he claimed that Obamacare could be repealed with a simple majority vote.
Shame on you, Mr. Prager. When choosing between the "purists" and the liars, you hitched yourself to the latter.
“According to The New York Times, 10 moderates, 15 conservatives, and eight other Republicans would have voted against the Republican repeal and replace Obamacare bill. So, then, 15 or so conservatives made it impossible to pass the bill favored by nearly every other Republican and by President Donald Trump.”
Well, Prager, was it the 15 conservatives who killed this Dream Bill or was it the “10 moderates + 8 others” who killed it? Fifteen members on their own could not have stopped ObummerCare 2.0.
The root of the failure is that it was a bill struck in secret by Ryan and who knows who else with no input from conservatives.
BTW, FR still is a conservative site isn’t it?
It may or may not be true about the Obamacare repeal fiasco, but Praeger is generally right. I’ve often enough seen big time libs elected to state offices because some dopehead “libertarian” decided to run for vanity reasons, ostensibly because the conservative candidate wasn’t “pure” enough. Not many votes for the dude, but 2 or 3 percent is enough to tip the scales these days, and totally queer an election.
NO.
What you have here is a sh#t sandwich that they refused to eat.
The RHINOs did not expect to win the ‘16 election EITHER. The had NOTHING to replace Obamacare. They lacked the b#lls to simply repeal it.
Hence this mess.
Dennis Prager ignores a couple of important points.
1. People are getting weary of Congress bringing forth from the cover of darkness new legislation that is thousands of pages long, written by unknown authors, and dropping it upon us with no chance to read and understand the legislation.
2. Prager also ignored the salient fact that only 17% of those polled approved RyanCare.
When Congress starts listening to ‘We the People’, maybe then we will be more supportive of them.
Purists have killed self-government.
Purists have for several decades smugly refused to take an active part in day to day and off-year political meetings. This is how DC RINOs have avoided answering to the people back home. Self-government cannot happen by spending a few minutes in a voting booth a few times a decade.
The Fools!
“damaging another major opportunity to do good”
Doing just “something” so as “to do something” is never necessarily “to do good”.
If - and I’m making no judgement - Ryan/Trumpcare was more then 50% pretense of change and reform than actual change of the status quo, then a majority of analysis might have correctly concluded it would not “do good” but continue to do too much harm by what it did not change.
How about the view that a better bill WAS possible, but such a better bill, a more thorough undoing of Obamacare was not on Mr Ryan’s agenda. Why should not Conservatives and moderates in the GOP question why Ryan was willing to settle for too little change and leave too much Obamacare in place.
This wasn't a case of the pure being an enemy of the good. It was a case of the good being the enemy of the bad. And it wasn't just "15 or so conservatives" that "made it impossible to pass the bill favored by nearly every other Republican and by President Donald Trump." Every conservative publication and blog that I read, and every conservative commentator on the radio that I listen to was against this horrible bill.
Thanks for your analysis.
Still, I’d like to test your assumption that the “purists” acted in “good faith” when they rejected Ryancare because they HONESTLY believed that a “better” bill was possible.
The test is simple.
The “purists” merely need to write the “better” bill that they claim to want AND get that “better bill” passed by Congress.
That’s it! A simple “Put up or shut up!”
If the “purists” DO deliver that “better” bill to the White House, that delivery will prove that the GOP “purists” acted in good faith and truly are patriots.
But, if they DON’T deliver that “better” bill, then the “purists” will have revealed something else....
BTW, rumor has it that the “Freedom Caucus” is planning to block construction of the border wall because -— wait for it — that wall is “...not high enough?”.
"Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted," the bill states.
Mo Brooks is a member of The House Freedom Caucus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ask your Congress Critter to sign the discharge petition for US Representative Mo Brooks's bill titled, "Obamacare Repeal Act"!!!!!!!!!!!
I really like Prager U but he is wrong on this one about the FC at least. The problem is that whoever wrote that bill had something else in mind as purists, maybe campaign donations.
Whoever opposed it, for whatever reason, did Trump and all of us a big favor.
There is no ‘purism’ about it. It was horrible with devastating political consequences.
The Democrats are ecstatic and a filibuster attempt is probably coming for Goursich now after this defeat. He was a sure thing now they feel they can spend capital to defeat him. Optics matter is the wide scheme of things.
Prager reflects my views pretty much here. I think conservatives too often are afflicted with the disease of wanting to stick 100% to principle and get nothing rather than compromise and get a much better deal. This mindset could very well destroy the Trump presidency, if he doesn’t do something to put a stop to it early. Will they try to derail his next two projects, taxes (including a border tax) and infrastructure? I very much hope not. He can’t afford to have three huge defeats in a row handed to him by his own party and have any chance of being an effective president.
It might still work out, but I expect that the next health care bill pretty much of necessity will have to be quite a bit further to the left than the Ryan tax breaks focused/no mandate plan. The window for using reconciliation in the Senate is closing soon. The next bill will probably need the support of several Democratic senators. Even if the nuclear option could somehow pass for this sort of bill, I really doubt the bill the Freedom Caucus wants could even get 50 Republican votes in the Senate, much less the 60 it will probably need. There are way more than just 2 moderate Republicans in the Senate who wouldn’t go along with that.
I see many commentators, including conservative ones like Lou Dobbs, were complaining that 24 million people would no longer have health insurance if the bill passed. Since this was the biggest complaint about the bill among the general population, it seems more than possible that next time around the government will somehow guarantee coverage for all these people, so no one will loose anything. Instead of saving up to $1 trillion over the long term like Ryan’s bill was supposed to, the new one will likely add significantly to the deficit, but on the brighter side it will be much more politically popular. I just hope no mandate is placed in the new bill in order to get enough votes to pass—although I think it was a Breitbart commentator who suggested that mandating minimum catastrophic coverage might be Trump’s compromise with the Dems to get a bill that can actually pass and that has things he wants like selling across state lines and promotion of competition between insurance companies.
Oh well, at least a bill with some Dem votes is more likely not to be repealed once the Dems get back in power. It’s just too bad that since Trump and the Repubs wanted to get tax reform passed via reconciliation, they have to make their cuts revenue neutral and they were counting on using the health care savings to allow them to slash taxes. Now that task is going to be a lot harder to work out (but then again we may get extra budget cuts, so it may be a blessing in disguise if they can make it work). Of course, all the gloating from the Dems celebrating the retention of their beloved Obamacare is a little hard to take too…
Purists killed the constitution too, bwahahahahaha.
It’s a wonder anything gets done.
The entire Congress could turn the instructions on making a PBJ Sandwich into a 1,000 page monstrosity.
Now the people actually trying to Repeal and Replace Obamacare are being blamed for it not getting done, amazing.
Hate to say it folks but we are outnumbered, not by another Party, but by the lack of a Conservative Ideology within the Republican Party.
President Trump is not a Ideologue, he is a Populist trying to get things done, which can been seen as good or bad.
My biggest hope in his Election is saving the Supreme Court which I think he can do. If Hillary got in the Republic was doomed. No doubt in my mind.
Now we have to drill down to get other things accomplished, and the Republicans are unable to form a solid wall unlike the Democrats do with just about everything they push through no matter how insane.