Another month, another GOP heath care bill, and another complete waste of time.
On Tuesday the Senate announced that it isn’t even going to vote on the Graham-Cassidy bill, the latest attempt to replace what is now looking to be the mightiest health care bill ever to land—the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare—because the Republicans’ bill sucked.
All of their bills have sucked. And all of this is President Donald Trump’s fault.
Did he create any of these bills? No. But he did run on a campaign promise to destroy Obamacare without knowing anything about health care. He tasked several lawmakers to draft bills to destroy Obamacare, lawmakers who couldn’t find their asses from a faux bullet hole in a gentrified New York bar, and all of their attempts have failed miserably.
CNN explains how it all went down:
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell met with lawmakers Tuesday to take stock of where his members are on the proposal and make the call once and for all if Graham-Cassidy, the latest bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, will get a vote in the Senate. The decision was that the votes simply weren’t there.
On Monday, Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, finally came out against the bill, a position she’d been teetering toward for days. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Rand Paul of Kentucky also opposed to the measure.
The calculations for health care are agonizing for McConnell. Putting a controversial bill on the floor without the votes exposes members to political fallout and attack ads. Many Republicans hadn’t even taken a public position on Graham-Cassidy, a bill that the Congressional Budget Office said Monday would drastically cut Medicaid and lead to millions of people not having health insurance compared to the status quo.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a bill sponsor, publicly thanked McConnell. “Thank you, it’s complicated, it’s difficult politics,” Graham told reporters.
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Yes, it’s been “difficult politics.” It’s the reason Sen. Bernie Sanders laughed hysterically at Trump when he said, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
They don’t have the votes now, and hopefully they won’t ever have the votes until they actually present a health care bill that doesn’t reward the rich and punish the hell out of the poor and middle class.
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Trump is also rumored to be willing to work with Democrats on the health care law, which would make sense, since the GOP don’t have a clue as to what they’re doing.
Read more at CNN.
