Excellent article in The Atlantic about whole trumpcare fiasco
"Eight years ago, when the Affordable Care Act was in its gestation period, then Republican Whip Eric Cantor said the GOP alternative to it was “weeks away.” It turned out to be 400 weeks. After ACA was enacted, we saw not a Republican alternative but 60-plus votes to repeal with a promise to replace. A week ago, when asked why Senate Republicans had to scramble to slap this plan together, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said it was because none of them had expected Donald Trump to win. Think about that: Toomey was admitting that Republicans saw no need to come up with their own health plan in a Clinton presidency; they could just continue to work to sabotage Obamacare and take more votes to repeal without any replacement to be judged by the same standards as other bills."
"Republicans had no real interest in actually fixing the health-care system. This bill is far more a delivery system for tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cutting Medicaid. Those tax cuts are the number one priority for conservatives in and out of Congress. But this could become a twofer. Conservatives have hated Medicaid ever since it was created in 1965. As Medicaid expanded to become the vehicle to pay for long-term care for the elderly along with care for the disabled and mentally ill, it became a huge government program. When Medicaid expansion became a core vehicle in Obamacare for giving health insurance to the poor, it became larger yet. So Republicans in Congress seized the moment to do something they have been unable to do in more than five decades—cut the program dramatically and shift the burden for the cuts largely to states. Doing so meant freeing up hundreds of billions of dollars that could then be used to pay for the first wave of deep tax cuts aimed especially at the richest among us."
"Put it all together, and what emerges is a truly disturbing picture of a failed legislative process built on a deep distortion of representative democracy."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-disturbing-process-behind-trumpcare/533850/
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