It’s been a tough week on many issues, but it’s important to note that we are making major progress in the #Fight4OurHealth.
The GOP’s original plan was to pass a repeal bill in early January so the President could sign it on Inauguration Day. They missed that.
Friday, they missed their own January 27th deadline (included in the budget resolution) to even introduce a repeal bill.
The plan to pass such a repeal was supposed be February 20th, but has been slipping, end of February, and now to March or April–enough to worry the Heritage Foundation. While thousands protested outside, the Republicans caucused in Philadelphia and pushed back their timeline even more, with a secret recording revealing grave doubts about their plans.
The Washington Post details some of the comments from inside, including from California Representative Tom McClintock:
“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created” with repeal, said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.). “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.”
“The fact is, we cannot repeal Obamacare through reconciliation,” McClintock said. “We need to understand exactly: What does that reconciliation market look like? And I haven’t heard the answer yet.”
To be clear, the most likely scenario is still the worst-case one: that the Congress goes ahead with their plans to pass the repeal of the ACA with no real replacement, throwing millions off health coverage and our health system into chaos and crisis.
But it seems that more Senators and Congressmembers are recognizing the backlash that would result against them politically. The other path is to slow down the rush to repeal, to confront the real life-and-death impact and tough policy trade-offs of what a replacement would look like. That would yield a much-less-bad result for the health system on which we all rely.
Let’s keep it up!