I
thought this statement was kind of fascinating. A
reporter asks “Representative Chris Collins (R-NY) to give her
just one example of Trump trying to work with Democrats.”
Collins:
[President Trump] has had Democrat senators into the White House time
and again, early on, talking about health care, attempting –
Tur:
In what way did he reach out? Give me one way he reached out on
healthcare other than a conversation?
Collins:
It starts with conversation, and he was shut down immediately by
Senator Schumer and the others, in saying that they weren't going to
support anything called a repeal of Obamacare. They worked to put
more money into the individual marketplace, but that was it. At which
point he had no choice, but to turn to the Republicans, Mitch
McConnell, Paul Ryan. We in the House sent a pretty darn good repeal
and replace that didn't get through the Senate, but it takes two
people and Senator Schumer –
So
Trump “had no choice” but to work with McConnell and Ryan, who
agreed with him that the ACA/Obamacare was hopelessly broken and
needed to be torn down entirely and replaced wholesale. It wasn't
that the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was stubborn, it was
that Schumer didn't agree on the scope or the shape of the problem.
Schumer felt that the problems with the ACA were small and fixable.
Trump went with the far more dire and apocolyptic view pressed by the
Republican Senate and House leaders. How did those two views end up
being substantiated? Here's
the view presented by Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway
in late July, after Trumpcare failed to win passage in the Senate:
CONWAY:
The president will not accept those who said it's, quote, time to
move on. He wants to help the millions of Americans who have suffered
with no coverage. They were lied to by the last president. They
couldn't keep the doctor. They couldn't keep their plan.
We’ve
met with the ObamaCare victims at the White House several times now.
They’re real people, they’re suffering.
Okay
so first off, yes, Trumpcare had crashed and burned with unanimous
Democratic “No” votes and three rock-solid Republican “No”
votes in the Senate, so yes it was and still is “time to move on.”
Second,
it's kind of interesting that Conway doesn't cite any problems that
require tearing down health care coverage for 20-plus million people.
All of the CBO estimates for all of the Republican replacement plans
in both the House and Senate called for removing at least 20 million
people from their ACA health care plans. Trump apparently just wanted
to extend coverage to even more people.
Were
the American people lied to by President Obama? Well, that “they
couldn't keep their plans” was pretty obvious to anyone who was
seriously following the debate over the ACA in the first place. If
you had crummy, inadequate individual coverage that had really high
deductivles and lots of rules you had to follow in order to make a
successful claim, then yes, such plans couldn't be kept. The ACA
insisted that plans had to be comprehensive and had to cover a
variety of health conditions and deductions were lmited by
regulations. The prior individual coverage was good if you were young
and healthy and were unlikely to ever make a claim and only really
cared about the price you were paying.
Very
interesting that Conway feels the need to assert that “Obamacare
victims” were “real people.” Apparently, they had to search for
people who weren't covered and their numbers appear to have been so
small that Conway feels the need to assert that there were indeed
such meetings.
Okay,
so what about people on the other side of the question, people who
urged a “No” vote on ACA repeal? How did ordinary citizens react
to the failure of Trumpcare? Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) was one of
the three Republican “No” votes and her
return to Maine was described in a local paper:
Friday
morning, as she wearily walked off her plane at Bangor International
Airport, Collins stepped out into a terminal gate packed with
passengers waiting to board their outbound flight.
She
recognized no one. But several of them recognized her and began to
applaud.
Within
seconds, the whole terminal was clapping, many people rising to their
feet as their sleep-deprived senator passed.
Never
before, throughout her two decades and 6,300 votes in the Senate, had
Collins received such a spontaneous welcome home.
“It
was absolutely extraordinary,” she said. “It was just so
affirming of what happens when you do the right thing.”
So
yeah, sounds to me as though Trump was given bum information by the
Republican House and Senate leaders. Had the amateur president any
real knowledge of the situation or the ability to separate BS from
real facts, he might have gone with Schumer and the Democrats to
achieving a real solution to a real problem.