CBO confirms what we’ve all known for years: Republicans never did have an ObamaCare alternative
The Congressional Budget Office officially released its assessment today of the new Republican-backed health care bill, and now we see why the Republicans wouldn’t allow the CBO to score the bill before they rolled it out. Turns out it’ll cause twenty-four million Americans to lose their health insurance entirely (fourteen million of them in the next year alone), and no one would benefit in any way shape or form. But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve already known this since long before the bill was introduced.
When President Obama and the Democrats first passed the Affordable Health Care into law, the Republicans put down all their chips on it failing. When it was a success instead, they tried lying about it. When those lies didn’t fully stick, they tried to sabotage it. And when that didn’t work, the Republicans childishly claimed that they had a superior alternative – but they weren’t going to tell anyone what it was until they were in power. Of course they never had a plan, because they never thought they’d be fully in power.
Then Russia installed the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, into the White House. And suddenly the Republican Congress gained the ability to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with their own alternative, which their own president is more than willing to sign without even reading it. Except they never had an alternative. When public protest over the past month made clear that they couldn’t get away with just repealing ObamaCare and being done with it, they realized they had to slap together an alternative. And naturally that alternative is garbage.
The Republican “American Health Care Act” is little more than a poorly crafted attempt at copycatting ObamaCare, but with enough things arbitrarily changed that they can claim it’s new and different. It takes the good things about ObamaCare and makes them worse. It also takes ObamaCare’s flaws and makes them worse too. It’s the kind of gibberish you quickly draw up on a napkin after you’ve spent the entire dinner telling your date that you’ve solved Fermat’s last theorem, and now your date wants you to prove it.
There’s a reason four Republican Senators are already standing in public opposition to this new health care bill, enough to prevent it from becoming law: it’s pure crap. It’s just a cheap knockoff of ObamaCare that makes a lot of things worse and makes nothing better. The Republican leadership in the House is now trying to convince us that this hot circle of garbage is the secret plan they’ve touting all these years. Even their own side isn’t buying it. The Republicans got into power by consistently lying about ObamaCare — and now that they’re in power, those lies will be their undoing. Contribute to Palmer Report
