Republicans' health-care hypocrisy is on full display - WaPo Editorial Board
By Editorial Board June 21 at 7:27 PM
REMEMBER WHEN Obamacare was written “hastily,” “behind closed doors” in “secret” negotiations, so that Democrats could “jam” an unpopular health-care bill through Congress? Remember when this showed that they “didn’t care what was in it” and that they had betrayed the “trust” of the American people? Remember when “the issue of health reform” was “too important to not take the time to get it right”?
Republicans are hoping you do not remember, or that you are willing to forget now that the shoe is on the other foot. Led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), they are barrelling toward a vote next week on a bill that as of Wednesday afternoon they had not released to the public — eliciting expressions of concern about the rushed process even from Republicans.
Criticism after criticism that Republicans have lobbed at Democrats over the years about how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed apply to a far greater extent to the health-care bill the GOP leadership has been drafting covertly.
Whereas various versions of the bill Democrats wrote in 2009 and 2010 went through committees , where Republicans could offer feedback and amendments, the Senate has held no hearings and no committee votes on the bill the Republicans are writing. Whereas the Democrats spent weeks trying to bargain with Republicans on health-care reform, Republicans have made no such attempt at good-faith negotiation as they have sought to reform the ACA. Whereas Senate Democrats held 25 days of debate on Obamacare, the Republicans have reportedly budgeted themselves about a week between the release of the bill’s text and the vote on it. With the Congressional Budget Office unable to release its analysis of any GOP plan until next week, there might be only a handful of days between publication of the official scorekeepers’ estimates of what the bill would do to Americans’ health care and the Senate vote.
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