For years, Republicans have fantasized about eliminating the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. While President Obama was in office, the House of Representatives voted over 60 times to repeal the ACA. It is their holy grail of policy pronouncements, and it was also a key campaign issue for Donald Trump in 2016.
But now that the GOP has control of both houses of Congress and an alleged president in the White House, turns out they’re about to soil themselves as they contemplate what might go wrong with their long-awaited plans to “repeal and replace.”
The Washington Post has obtained a secret recording from Thursday’s meeting of Republicans in Philadelphia, and various GOP lawmakers can be heard giving voice to their fears.
California Congressman Tom McClintock remarks:
“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created [with repeal]. That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock, and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”
Elsewhere on the recording, New Jersey Representative Tom MacArthur warns:
“We’re telling those people that we’re not going to pull the rug out from under them, and if we do this too fast, we are in fact going to pull the rug out from under them.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan was quoted as saying this about the repeal and replace promise regarding Obamacare:
“We don’t want to set arbitrary deadlines on things. We want to move quickly, but we want to get things right.”
That’s probably a good idea considering that Oregon Congressman Greg Walden is heard on the leaked tape complaining:
“There’s no single fix. There’s no single plan.”
Actually, there are two fixes, neither of which any Republican will like but cannot hope to deny:
- Leave the ACA as is.
- Replace the ACA with universal healthcare, much like the Canadian system.
Now that Republicans have caught the proverbial bus they’ve been chasing for years, they don’t have a clue what to do next.
This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org