LESSONS LEARNED: TrumpRyanCare Obits

“Repeal and Replace” was a political play!
After eight years of whining, “there was no there there”, no Republican plan!
Following is a sequence of obituary snippets explaining what happened and why.

Ryan: ObamaCare will be law for ‘foreseeable future’
“GOP leadership and the White House had spent weeks attempting to bring skeptical Republicans on board. Conservatives argued the bill didn’t go far enough to repeal ObamaCare, while moderate lawmakers worried about backlash in their districts from those who came to rely on ObamaCare.”
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/325700-ryan-we-came-close-but-came-up-short-on-healthcare-bill
THE HILL. Ben Kamisar

Why Trumpcare Failed
“After making repeal of that law their top legislative priority for the past seven years, Republicans now join the much longer list of failures because, during all that time, they never reached a consensus. Rather than come up with a plan the party could unite behind, and with the ACA filling the space where bipartisan consensus could be had, they splintered and entrenched. You can’t bridge that divide. (For their own political sakes, they’re lucky they didn’t.)”
“Freedom Caucus members have a cold vision of health care reform, but a coherent one. They believe that the government being involved in health care, either through regulation or subsidies, is the factor driving up prices, and undoing all of that architecture is what’s necessary to allow market forces to drive down prices. Being coherent in this way on health care policy means accepting the trade-offs that your vision entails, and Freedom Caucus members accept that this approach would leave a lot of vulnerable people in the lurch, left to the care of charities and communities. They have an odd belief that a vast majority of the American public shares this vision despite representing only a small percentage of the House of Representatives.”
Slate. Jim Newell http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/03/all_of_the_reasons_why_trumpcare_failed.html

In Major Defeat for Trump, Push to Repeal Health Law Fails
“The Republican bill would have repealed tax penalties for people without health insurance, rolled back federal insurance standards, reduced subsidies for the purchase of private insurance and set new limits on spending for Medicaid, the federal-state program that covers more than 70 million low-income people. The bill would have repealed hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes imposed by the Affordable Care Act and would also have cut off federal funds to Planned Parenthood for one year.
Mr. Ryan had said the bill included “huge conservative wins.” But it never won over conservatives who wanted a more thorough eradication of the Affordable Care Act. Nor did it have the backing of more moderate Republicans who were anxiously aware of the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment that the bill would leave 24 million more Americans without insurance in 2024, compared with the number who would be uninsured under the current law.
The budget office also warned that in the short run, the Republicans’ legislation would drive insurance premiums higher. For older Americans approaching retirement, the cost of insurance could have risen sharply.”
New York Times. ROBERT PEAR, THOMAS KAPLAN and MAGGIE HABERMAN

Why Republicans failed to repeal Obamacare
“Let me briefly try to answer this question: How did Republicans fail to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? In no order, and off the top of my addled mind at the end of a crushing week:
— They hated Obamacare but they never understood the Affordable Care Act. This is the uber-explanation for much of what follows. Hating Obamacare became just what you did on the right. It didn’t mean you understood it, beyond maybe getting that it was a government program and thus paid for by taxes. It certainly (and this turned out to be very important) didn’t mean you had any ideas about what it did, how it worked or how many people were benefiting from it … or how to replace it.”
The Washington Post. Jared Bernstein
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/24/what-just-happened-explaining-the-republicans-big-health-care-fail/?utm_term=.15fbea5ab191

The Trumpcare Con Implodes
“Passing the bill would have also made a joke of Republican promises that, given the chance, they would replace Obamacare with something that would result in cheaper, better insurance for more people. Trump himself went much further, guaranteeing “insurance for everybody” at government expense. The American Health Care Act was diametrically opposed to those supposed goals.
And that’s what really matters, after all: The practical effects of huge changes to the health care system for those who actually need to use it, alongside the faith Americans can have that their elected officials are making promises they will at least attempt to keep.
Instead, the GOP, from Trump on down, spent years claiming they had a magic plan to make everyone’s health care better, and then tried to bang through a bill in just a few weeks that would have covered fewer people, who would have had to pay much more for whatever care they got, without even reducing the deficit conservatives pretend to care about by all that much. They didn’t even bother waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to assess the final product, so little did they care for the real-world effects it might have.”
U.S.News. Pat Garofalo
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2017-03-24/trumpcare-con-ends-in-deserved-gop-failure

Three Real Reasons “TrumpCare” Failed
“Why was the bill so unpopular? First and foremost it’s because most people hate the underlying Republican philosophy pertaining to health care. And they hate it for good reason: it doesn’t work.
We tried the GOP philosophy of allowing the “competitive” market to provide the “most wonderful health care plan in the world” and it produced a system that resulted in per person health care costs twice as high as the rest of the industrial world and outcomes that were worse. That was the world of pre-ACA health care.
The “unfettered market” allowed insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions – and to define one of those “pre-existing conditions” as simply being a woman. It allowed them to enforce lifetime caps on coverage – so if you got really sick you were simply out of luck.”
The Huffington Post. Robert Creamer
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/three-real-reasons-trumpcare-failed-gop-divisions_us_58d78074e4b0c0980ac0e701

The cruel double standard that may have saved Obamacare
“But others cite another factor: The face of Obamacare is now white.
More Americans now realize Obamacare helps millions of working class whites and that it’s not — as once portrayed by conservatives — a form of welfare pushed by the first black president to help people of color, historians and scholars say. The media landscape is filled with images of the furrowed brows of anxious white residents at congressional town halls who fear they will suffer if they lose Obamacare, says Judy Lubin, a sociologist and adjunct professor at Howard University in Washington.
“When you see white working-class Americans saying that I’m benefiting and my family is getting help from the Affordable Care Act, you start to hear ‘repair’ not ‘repeal,'” Lubin says. “Whites standing up in support of a policy changes the dynamics of the conversation.”
CNN. John Blake
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/politics/obamacare-double-standard/

Trump’s Trainwreck
“For seven years — seven years — Republicans thundered about the evils of Obamacare, yearned for the day when they could bury it and vowed to do precisely that once the ball was in their hands.
Last week proved that this had all been an emotional and theatrical exercise, not a substantive one. The ball was in their hands, and they had no coherent playbook. No real play. They scurried around the Capitol with their chests deflated and their tails between their legs.
For the entirety of his campaign, Donald Trump crowed about his peerless ability to make deals, one of which, he assured us, was going to be a replacement for Obamacare that would cut costs without leaving any Americans in the lurch.
Last week proved that there was no such swap, that he hadn’t done an iota of work to devise one and that he was spectacularly unprepared to shepherd such legislation through Congress. As his promise lay in tatters at his feet, he gave a delusional interview to Time magazine about what an infallible soothsayer he is, then tried to shift the blame to Democrats, who, he said, would soon be the ones hankering for an Obamacare replacement.”
New York Times. Frank Bruni

Trump: I never said repeal and replace would come in 64 days
“Yet asked if he would talk to Democrats now that Republicans are moving on, Trump said no.
“I think we have to let Obamacare go its way for a little while, and we’ll see how things go. I’d love to see it do well, but it can’t. I mean, it can’t,” Trump said. “It’s not a question of, ‘Gee, I hope it does well.’ I would love it to do well. I want great health care for the people of this nation, but it can’t do well. It’s imploding and soon will explode, and it’s not gonna be pretty. So the Democrats don’t wanna see that so they’re gonna reach out when they’re ready. And whenever they’re ready, we’re ready.” “
POLITICO. Nolan D. McCaskill
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-obamacare-statement-repeal-replace-236482

With GOP Plan Dead, Trump Weighs Other Ways to Reshape Health Care
Republicans have ability to make changes to Affordable Care Act but do so at their own risk
“With the collapse of Republicans’ health plan in the House on Friday, the Trump administration is set to ramp up its efforts to alter the Affordable Care Act in one of the few ways it has left—by making changes to the law through waivers and rule changes.”
Wall Street Journal. Stephanie Armour
https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-gop-plan-dead-trump-eyes-other-ways-to-reshape-health-care-1490434201