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Republicans’ healthcare plan collapsed this week but they’re not done yet – AOL

Senate Republicans came out 20 hours of debate with a stunning failure in their efforts to overhaul the US healthcare system, leaving President Donald Trump's agenda in tatters and the party with few clear options moving forward on healthcare.

From Tuesday to early Friday morning, the Senate voted on four new plans to repeal and/or replace the Affordable Care Act (three serious, one not-so-serious). All four were unsuccessful, including Friday morning's dramatic 2:00 a.m. vote that failed when Sen. John McCain cast his ballot against the measure.

RELATED: Lawmakers, politicians react to Republicans pulling health care bill

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Lawmakers, politicians react to Republicans pulling health care bill

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Today was a victory for all Americans. https://t.co/LX6lzQXtBR

I want to thank @POTUS, @VP, @SecPriceMD, & @HouseGOP members. There remains so much we can do to help improve peop https://t.co/KIF3gh2VpQ

Today is a great victory but we have a lot more work to do. We are going to go forward and guarantee health care to https://t.co/3gnwfY94Lq

My statement on the #AHCA https://t.co/XhWEOh1cP4

Ultimately the #Trumpcare bill failed because of two traits that have plagued the Trump presidency: incompetence & broken promises.

#TrumpCare was about spite. It was brought up because they loved the optics of a vote on ACA's 7th annv -- not because it was a good idea.

I applaud House conservatives for keeping their word to the American people. I look forward to passing full repeal https://t.co/ftyj6sCw0v

.@HouseGOP I hope this means you're finally ready to get serious and work with us to improve the Affordable Care Ac https://t.co/r78FqnGiVr

I remain wholeheartedly committed to keeping the promise I made to my NC-11 constituents--to fully repealing and re https://t.co/o02kApIzQq

This is why we fight. When we get out there & fight, we can make a real difference.

Can't throw @POTUS under the bus. He is the BUS. My fellow republicans are figuring that out.

Hey Republicans, don't worry, that burn is covered under the Affordable Care Act

Art of the Squeal: I blame Democrats for a bill Republicans couldn't pass. I blame Obama. I blame Australian Prime https://t.co/fgtocQM5Bx

.@realDonaldTrump, @SpeakerRyan: we're not tired of winning yet. Ready when you are to talk real solutions to fix A https://t.co/QLU1WJA7S8

Here's my statement on the cancellation of the House vote on the American Health Care Act: https://t.co/nbDhvshFKU

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The failure left Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with no clear path forward. The Senate has been grappling for weeks with healthcare overhaul, running through different versions of legislation before settling on the more modest attempt with the aim of moving to a conference with the House of Representatives.

Even so, it's not the end of the road for the healthcare debate.

"This isn't the end for Repeal and Replace," Cowen analyst Rick Weissenstein said on Friday. "After seven years of railing against the ACA, GOP lawmakers can't just abandon the quest."

Of the three, the Trump administration's actions could inflict the most immediate damage on the ACA, Cynthia Cox, associate director at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Business Insider. That could be through a decision to stop funding cost-sharing-reduction payments, which help offset costs for insurers, not enforcing the individual mandate, or not doing outreach to inform Americans about their health insurance options.

Going forward, the plan to repeal and replace the ACA might be less about sweeping changes and more about incremental tweaks.

"While it is hard to see a path forward for a comprehensive bill, the GOP is likely to try to attach discrete provisions aimed at defunding parts of the bill or unwinding some of the ACA's insurance or benefit mandates are likely," Weissenstein said.

And there's a chance that Medicaid is safe from huge cuts. Both the House and the Senate bill would have made drastic cuts to Medicaid, the government program that covers 74 million low-income Americans. Even the "skinny" bill that was the Senate's final vote on Friday morning didn't make any major changes to Medicaid. The changes to Medicaid were the sticking point for many Republican senators who had concerns about the bill going into the vote.

But, Cox said, the fact that Medicaid cuts were in both plans suggests that there will continue to be a desire to change the program. One Medicaid program in particular, the Children's Health Insurance Program, is coming up for a reauthorization vote in September, which could leave some room for Republicans to make some changes.

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On Health, Republicans Find They Cannot Beat Something With Nothing – New York Times

But after six months of repeated failures to pass any meaningful legislation during what is traditionally the most productive time for a party with unified control of both the White House and Congress, it is Republicans who are clearly flailing.

The Senate has rejected a scaled-down Republican plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. The 49-to-51 vote was a humiliating setback for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Once architects of conservative policy, the party appears short of fresh ideas, left to try to find often incoherent compromises between the hard right flank that helped bring it to power and the populist notions that fueled President Trumps victory last year. Republicans talked incessantly about patient-centered health care, but it was a slogan that never had much meaning. Their only coherent argument for excising the health care law was because they said they would for seven years.

This is what you get when you have a president with no fixed principles, indifferent to policy and ignorant of the legislative process, said Charlie Sykes, a veteran Republican operative and former radio host. He added, Theres a difference between whiteboards and legislating in the real world. Its hard to take away benefits once conferred.

Many of the party leaders appear to remain out of step with their own voters, who took seriously Mr. Trumps warm embrace of some government entitlement programs, even as he abandoned those notions in recent months. While some conservative pundits attacked their failure to repeal the health care law this spring, scant protests rose up from the right to counter the thousands of Affordable Care Act supporters who appealed to lawmakers for months to maintain much of the law.

Congressional Republicans, especially in the House, are hamstrung by their lack of legislative experience. Many of them have never served under a president of their own party or passed major policy reforms that require at least token bipartisan support, and remain in chin-out oppositional mode.

Most of the health care bills they have passed were largely symbolic gestures that they knew would be vetoed by President Obama. But those bills, including a root-to-branch repeal vote in 2015, came back to haunt them, creating expectations with the partys base that they were unwilling to revisit once in power.

The Republicans were never really forced in their years of opposition to come up with a coherent alternative, said Peter Wehner, a director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under President George W. Bush. There was no human cost in those artificial votes, and that did not force them to come up with a real governing alternative. He added, As the years went by the Affordable Care Acts roots grew and it became entwined in the health care system. It was an extremely complicated legislative task to undo it.

Republicans built no coalition around their bill, choosing instead to alienate the sorts of groups they said were simply paid off by Democrats when they passed the Affordable Care Act, in particular insurance companies. Absent that coalition, Republicans needed one another to counter the voices of doctors, hospitals, disease groups, the AARP and others who attacked their efforts. But even as the bill was about to be voted on, after Democrats came to the floor to give passionate speeches urging its failure, few Republicans came to its defense.

In the end, Senator Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, was reduced to running out the clock as he read some notions about health care from a podium, refusing to take questions from heckling Democrats.

The most consistent voice on the bill was that of Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, but her voice was raised in perpetual opposition to both the process involved in drafting the bill and its substance. Ms. Collins, no fan of the current law, still gave persistent voice to a repeals most likely losers, who also happen to greatly populate her home state the old, the poor and those living in rural areas.

But most Republicans believe that their path to repealing the law would have likely succeeded had it not been for Mr. Trump, whose comments about other topics and inconsistent support for their work he celebrated a House-passed bill in a Rose Garden ceremony only to denounce it as mean weeks later undermined their efforts.

I think this is in good measure Trumps fault, Mr. Wehner said, echoing what many Republicans said privately and increasingly in public. He has no knowledge of public policy and is indifferent to it. To try and get massive reform through Congress, even if you have control of Congress, you need the president to be an asset. He isnt only not an asset, he is an active adversary. He is dead weight for Republicans.

Members of both parties said that the only path forward for health care and indeed any legislation would now have to be a product of bipartisan efforts.

I believe we have an opportunity now to have discussions on durable, sustainable reforms, said Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania who opposed the House efforts this year to repeal the law. I think moderate voices will be important in health care just as they already have been on budgets, appropriations bills and anything else that needs to be enacted into law.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the Morning Briefing newsletter.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on July 29, 2017, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: After Health Failure, G.O.P. Is Floundering.

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On Health, Republicans Find They Cannot Beat Something With Nothing - New York Times

July 29th, 2017

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This is what you get when you elect Republicans – Washington Post

This has been quite a week in Washington, a week full of terror, intrigue, suspense, backstabbing and outright chaos. While we might not have been able to predict the particular contours of the catastrophe that complete GOP rule has been, we should have known it would turn out something like this.

Guess what, America: This is what you get when you elect Republicans.

It goes much further than their repugnant and disastrous effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but all the contemporary GOPs pathologies could be seen there: their outright malice toward ordinary people, their indifference to the suffering of their fellow citizens, their blazing incompetence, their contempt for democratic norms, their shameless hypocrisy, their gleeful ignorance about policy, their utter dishonesty and bad faith, their pure cynicism, and their complete inability to perform anything that resembles governing. It was the perfect Republican spectacle.

Its remarkable to consider that there was a time not too long ago when the Grand Old Party was known for being serious, sober, a little boring, but above all, responsible. They were conservative in the traditional sense: wanting to conserve what they thought was good and fearful of rapid change. You might not have agreed with them, but there were limits to the damage they could do. The devolution from that Republican Party to the one we see today took a couple of decades and had many sources, but its fullest expression was reached with the lifting up of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, this contemptible buffoon who may have been literally the single worst prominent American they could have chosen to be their standard-bearer. I mean that seriously. Can you think of a single person who might have run for president who is more ignorant, more impulsive, more vindictive and more generally dangerous than Donald Trump? And yet they rallied around him with near-unanimity, a worried shake of the head to his endless stream of atrocious statements and actions the strongest dissent most of them could muster.

With their repeal effort dead for now, Republicans still need to make some difficult health insurance decisions. The Post's Paige W. Cunningham explains what comes next. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

So now we see the results of putting this party and this president in charge. Lets take a little tour around the news and see whats going on, shall we?

I could go on and delve into the presidents plan to blow up the Iran nuclear deal, or the climate-denial initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency, or all the fossil-fuel lobbyists now staffing the Interior Department, or any of a hundred abominable policies and programs. But the point is, were getting just what we should have expected. Donald Trump isnt an aberration, hes the apotheosis of contemporary Republicanism.

Senate Republicans attempted to pass a "skinny repeal" bill that would undo some portions of the Affordable Care Act on July 28, but the bill failed after three GOP senators voted against it. (The Washington Post)

Republicans dont care about making an honest case for their priorities; Trump lies nearly every time he opens his mouth. Theyre unconcerned about the details of policy; he knows less about how government works than your average sixth-grader. Theyre indifferent to human suffering; he literally advocates destroying the individual health-care market so he can blame Barack Obama for the lives that wind up ruined. They advocate a mindless anti-government philosophy; he has so much contempt for governing that he puts his son-in-law in charge of everything from solving the opioid crisis to achieving Middle East peace. They whine endlessly about the liberal media; he spends hours every day watching Fox & Friends and takes advice from Sean Hannity. Trump is the essence of the GOP, distilled down to its depraved and odious core.

America was given a reprieve last night, saved from the Republicans cruelest plans by a Democratic Party that stood strong, thousands of activists and ordinary citizens who organized in opposition and the GOPs own incompetence. But this what you get when you give todays Republican Party complete control of the government. Have no doubt: There are more horrors to come.

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This is what you get when you elect Republicans - Washington Post

July 29th, 2017

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Congress Emerges From Another Health Care Failure Without A Clear Path Forward – NPR

Sen. John McCain says defeat of the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act is a chance for a fresh start. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

Sen. John McCain says defeat of the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act is a chance for a fresh start.

Updated at 3 p.m. ET

The day following the defeat of the latest attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act, Republicans predictably expressed disappointment, Democrats relief, and both sides uncertainty over what, exactly, comes next.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., issued a statement that pointedly reminded GOP voters that the House upheld its end of the deal and approved a bill repealing and replacing Obamacare.

"Unfortunately," Ryan said, "the Senate was unable to reach a consensus. I am disappointed and frustrated, but we should not give up. I encourage the Senate to continue working toward a real solution that keeps our promise."

Speaking to a audience of law enforcement officers on Long Island, N.Y., President Trump said, "They should have approved health care last night, but you can't have everything, boy oh boy." He added, "They've been working on that for seven years, can you believe that? The Swamp. But we'll get it done, we're going to get it done." Trump also stated that he "said from the beginning, let Obamacare implode and then do it. I turned out to be right, let Obamacare implode."

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, though clearly pleased with the outcome of the vote early Friday morning, insisted it was "not a time for celebration, it's a time for relief." He praised Republican Sen. John McCain as a hero for his vote against the Senate GOP repeal plan, calling it it an "amazing moment" one he hopes will be "a turning point where the Senate turned back from it's partisanship and started to work together."

In his own statement, McCain said the failure of the GOP plan "presents the Senate with an opportunity to start fresh. It is now time to return to regular order with input from all of our members Republicans and Democrats and bring a bill to the floor of the Senate for amendment and debate."

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, another of the three Republicans to vote against the GOP plan (Alaska's Lisa Murkowski was the other), said she is pleased that Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., has said he will hold hearings on reform measures.

Schumer suggested the two sides could find consensus on measures aimed at shoring up Obamacare, saying, "Nobody has said Obamacare is perfect."

But whether there's much appetite among Republicans for merely tweaking the health insurance program remains to be seen.

Trump tweeted after the GOP plan was defeated that the next step should be "let Obamacare implode, then deal."

Schumer called that approach "sabotage," and said he hopes Republicans in the House and Senate "will turn a deaf ear on that."

Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., was critical of Trump, saying, "He never really laid out core principles and didn't sell them to the American people."

Whether repeal of the Affordable Care Act is really, most sincerely dead, as the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz was pronounced, remains to be seen.

After the vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the floor, "I regret that our efforts were simply not enough at this time." He denounced Democrats' opposition to Republican efforts to "find a way to something better than Obamacare," adding, "It's time for our friends on the other side to tell us what they have in mind. And we'll see how the American people feel about their ideas."

He concluded his remarks by saying, "It's time to move on," naming the next legislation on the agenda for Friday.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement that "cutting taxes for middle class families and fixing our broken tax code" is at the top of his list when Congress returns from its August recess.

At a House GOP conference Friday morning, Ryan reportedly recited the lyrics to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," a metaphor he suggested for the sinking of the GOP's seven-year journey to repeal Obamacare.

Traveling Friday afternoon, President Trump responded to questions about the health care vote by saying, "It's going to be fine."

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Congress Emerges From Another Health Care Failure Without A Clear Path Forward - NPR

July 29th, 2017

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