Conservative Promises, Republican Lies: The Disaster of Trumpcare
Before the American Health Care Act (nicknamed Trumpcare) ever had a chance to be voted on, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan withdrew the bill from consideration after failing to garner sufficient Republican support.
In the days before the failure of Trumpcare, Speaker Ryan repeatedly referred to the vote as a “binary choice.” This is a ridiculous statement for a lawmaker to make. Ryan’s job is to create good bills and stop bad ones. He cannot create bad legislation and then act as if it was the only choice in the first place.
The last time Ryan used his binary choice rhetoric was in the 2016 election when he was endorsing Donald Trump, and although the phrase is more applicable there, it shows it’s really what he says when trying to force Republicans to vote against their principles.
Republicans in the Freedom Caucus are catching a lot of heat from the president for not voting for Trumpcare, when really they did Trump a favor.
Trumpcare was a proposal generally hated by everyone. A poll conducted before the failure of the bill showed it only had a 24% approval rating, somehow even worse than Trump’s personal approval rating.
Trumpcare was full of problems. The biggest arguably being that it would not have solved the main issue Republicans have with Obamacare: soaring premiums. Trumpcare repealed the individual mandate and employer mandates, but left the pre-existing condition mandate. This is a formula for disaster. Healthy people without pre-existing conditions would have dropped their coverage and insurance companies would still have been forced to take on all pre-existing conditions, so people would only have bought insurance when they were sick. Sound cheap?
Senior citizens would be most directly hurt by the drastic premium increases.
Trumpcare would also exacerbate the rising debt, and would fine people who choose not to remain on insurance. These are not very conservative principles. Daniel Horowitz of the Conservative Review said of the bill: “House Republicans have replaced the notorious taxes, regulations, subsidies and mandates of Obamacare with … taxes, regulations, subsidies and mandates.”
Clearly, the Freedom Caucus––the most conservative members in the House of Representatives––saw these problems. As bad as it looked for Republicans when the bill failed, it would have been worse for this bill to pass.
Now that it has failed, logically one would think Republicans might seriously consider a conservative, free market based healthcare plan. Instead, Trump and Ryan seem more intent on working with Democrats.
How Trump thinks this will work is beyond me, seeing as he has a 5% approval rating among Democrats. How could Democrats in the House or Senate tell their constituents that they thought it was a good idea to compromise with Trump? It would be political suicide. The Left’s game plan has been to oppose Trump at every turn. If Trump can’t pass anything with a Republican majority he is in trouble, because with a Democratic one, odds are he’d be impeached.
Trump’s attack on the Freedom Caucus is a reminder that the president doesn’t care about conservative principles.
Conservatives helped Republicans win the House in 2010 when Republicans fiercely opposed Obamacare. In 2014, conservatives helped elect Republicans to the Senate, with one of the major promises being that they would repeal Obamacare. In 2016, conservatives, including those in the Freedom Caucus, helped elect Trump as he promised to repeal and replace Obamacare.
In 2017, conservatives learned that Republicans were lying.
Rather than create a well-calibrated bill and working with all Republicans, Speaker Ryan rushed this awful bill out, and Trump sicced his attack dog Steve Bannon on the Freedom Caucus to tell them that they had no choice but to vote for the bill.
An actual conservative approach would involve less taxes and mandates across the board, and would allow competition to drive down prices. In fact, the plan to block grant money to states to try to fix the Medicaid system was a good idea, perhaps the only good thing about the Trumpcare proposal.
Although Bernie Sanders may say that healthcare should be a fundamental right for all Americans, that isn’t really how rights work. The government doesn’t give you your right to free speech, you naturally have it, and the Constitution promises to make no law prohibiting that. You don’t naturally have the right to the service of another person, however, so you have no basic right to healthcare.
As President Trump just recently learned, healthcare is a difficult issue. It won’t be solved by one perfect bill, but the best way forward is in the opposite direction that Trump has chosen. The optimum path involves taking more time to construct legislation that gets government less involved in the business of healthcare.
