At this point--and things have been changing literally hour by hour for more than a week--it looks as if the Republican Party and Donald Trump and much of the media will be crowing later today about a remarkable, last-minute, "victory" on health care brought about by Trump's personal lobbying efforts.
This bill is probably the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Congress. It's not a health-care bill. This bill will take health insurance away from more than 20 million Americans who have insurance today in favor of tax cuts for the rich. Thousands of Americans who would have survived under Obamacare will die each year if this bill is passed. Thousands of Americans will again go bankrupt each year because of medical expenses if this bill is passed. The bill includes an exemption for members of Congress so that they can continue to enjoy better health care than the people they represent. The bill guts Medicaid. This bill does NOT protect people with pre-existing conditions. It would separate those people from the general insurance population and will allow insurance companies to deny those them insurance by making it prohibitively expensive. This bill denies affordable health care to lower income women by defunding Planned Parenthood. The Wall Street Journal revealed just this morning that the bill allow employers to not provide their employees with affordable, comprehensive health insurance--a catastrophic step back to the dark ages that ensures that this bill will have the potential to hurt ALL Americans.
How did the Republicans create such a monstrosity?
Despite seven years of opposition and more than 65 votes to repeal it, the Republcans had no health care bill ready when Trump was inaugurated.
No Republican has read this bill. There has been no draft of the bill to read.
This bill has been rushed through the House in less than a week.
There gave been no hearings on this bill. No input was allowed from the American people, Democrats, or health-care professionals.
No Republican knows what will happen if this bill is passed. They are voting on this bill before the Congressional Budget Office publishes an analysis of its impact.
This bill is a Frankensteinian construct designed by less than a dozen Americans: a handfull Republican representatives, Trump, Pence, and Paul Ryan.
The only criteria for the design of this bill was to get 216 Republican votes. The only reason the Republicans want to kill the ACA is because it has Obama's name on it. They know that they are lying when they say that Obamacare is collapsing, and they refuse to even consider fixing its shortcomings.
It's true that there is no chance that the Senate will pass a bill that resembles this one, but we should all be deeply fearful for our nation that such an immoral, corrupt travesty has passed the House. There can be no quarter with the Republicans. They care nothing about the American people or about governing. They are determined to take their crackpot economic theories--which have recently destroyed the economirs of Kansas and Louisiana--and implement them nationwide.
The only possible positive from today's national tragedy is that 216 or more Republicans will be on record as voting for a supremely cruel and un-American piece of legislation. The American people must prove this hellish tribe to be not winners but a group of political suicide bombers who have just detonated their vests today and thereby doomed the GOP to lose their House majority in 2018. If we don't use this treacherous bill against the GOP to transform the makeup of the House, this country may be damaged beyond recovery by 2020.
I would also hope that today's horror show in Congress will cause progressives and leftists who feel passionately that there is literally NO difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to soberly revisit that position, which is clearly and unambiguously refuted by today's vote. As lame, frustrating, and even corrupt as the Democrats can be, there is no way that group would ever submit, much less approve, such a vicious bill. The reality is that a vote for the lesser of two evils, as Dan Savage has pointed out, is LESS EVIL. If after today you still do not accept that sitting out an election because your own chosen candidate was not triumphant can wreak needless devastation and, literally, death on your fellow citizens, you need to own the fact that by doing so you are relinquishing your right to complain about--and fight--its real-world impact. This shameful day needs to be a juncture where we all look deep into our own hearts and respond to the impure complexity of reality by fighting for our fellow Americans and against the horror and profound cruelty of Trumpism and not with each other.
