We know that McConnell/Ryan/Trumpcare is going to be horrible:
The tax credits for people who buy insurance on the exchanges are ... stingier than the current system. Right now, Obamacare’s tax credits cut off for people who earn four times the poverty level, which means people just over that threshold often struggle to afford insurance. Rather than fix this problem, the Senate bill would set the cutoff even lower, to three-and-a-half times the poverty level, making insurance unaffordable for more people in the middle class.
Amazingly, the Senate bill reportedly institutes deeper Medicaid cuts than the House bill.... The House version holds the program to the inflation rate plus one percent — which is historically lower than medical costs have risen, meaning that the program would have to curtail benefits for its beneficiaries, who tend to be poor and very sick. The Senate bill would cut growth down to the inflation rate, without the extra one percent.
... The tax cuts are what drive the bill’s inescapable cruelty. By eliminating nearly a trillion dollars in revenue, it necessarily creates a trillion dollars in cuts for coverage subsidies. The House bill reduces the insurance rolls by 23 million. The Senate bill won’t fare a whole lot better.
Even though the Senate bill would "effectively delay repeal of Obamacare until 2020," as Bloomberg puts it, most observers think Republicans will be blamed for any chaos in the health care system between now and whenever Obamacare starts winding down -- insurance companies will rush for the exits, policies will be unavailable or staggeringly expensive, and because we will have all seen the final passage of the bill and the big signing ceremony involving the president, we'll all agree that the GOP owns the results.
I'm not so sure. I think Republicans will still blame the bad outcome on Democrats.
In his pseudo-campaign rally last night in Cedar Rapids, we heard this from the president:
“If we went and got the single greatest health care plan in the history of the world, we would not get one Democrat vote, because they’re obstructionists,” Trump said. “If we came to you and said, ‘Here’s your plan, you’re going to have the greatest plan in history, and you’re going to pay nothing,’ they’d vote against it, folks.” ...
“If we had even a little Democrat support, just a little, like a couple of votes, you’d have everything. And you could give us a lot of votes and we’d even be willing to change it and move it around and try and make it even better,” Trump said. “But again, They just want to stop, they just want to obstruct. A few votes from the Democrats, seriously, a few votes from the Democrats, it could be so easy and so beautiful, and you’d have cooperation.”
That's going to be the right-wing narrative of our upcoming health care disaster: We Republicans passed a bad bill because Democrats forced us to. They just wanted to be the Party of No, so they refused to help make it better. Therefore, every bad consequence of what we did is their fault.
Of course, this is a preposterous. Mitch McConnell hasn't even allowed his fellow Republicans to work on the bill, or even to see it -- he certainly wasn't going to accept input from Democrats. The plan is for the bill to be rushed through the Senate (and then, I assume, the plan will be for the House to pass the Senate's bill with equal haste). And what kind of message is this for Republicans going forward? Vote for us, not for the terrible people who refused to improve the awful bill we wrote -- seriously?
But I think you'll hear this regularly in the right-wing media. I think McConnell, Paul Ryan, and other elected Republicans will brazenly argue that Democrats have some nerve complaining about the outcome when they announced an effective boycott of the process from the beginning.
The majority of Republican voters will actually fall for this. I hope very few other voters do.
Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog
