Donald Trump has previously stated that he thought a good political strategy for Republicans would be to “let” (read: make) the Affordable Care Act fail. He reportedly brought it up again in private while talking to members of Congress about how he wants them to support the GOP’s terrible new healthcare bill in the House, and he brought it up again today—and then grudgingly muttered that they couldn’t do it like someone took away his toys (around :40 in the video above).
Why can’t Republicans deliberately sabotage the ACA into failure and blame it on the Democrats as Trump’s suggestion goes? Two main reasons:
1. American citizens are actual human beings who need healthcare, you callous baby-man.
2. Once you tell people that you’re going to deliberately tank a necessary societal system for the explicit reason of blaming your opponents, everyone knows it’s really your fault, you dolt. You get all the horrible repercussions on your hands and no benefit. It’s a genuinely idiotic plan.
He’s not some wonderful savior for grudgingly admitting that tanking the ACA would be the wrong thing for the American people—even if he’d said so with less of a sound of disappointment in his voice. As the president, you don’t get bonus points for acting in the best interests of the people in the country instead of being petty and vindictive while using people’s lives just to make a point. That’s the bare minimum of your job.
Trump’s statements helpfully underline an important party of reality, though: The GOP has been trying for a long time to undermine the ACA in order to turn it into a failure. Not only did they come up with the name “Obamacare” in the first place to rally people against it and, in some cases, confuse them into not even realizing it was the same as the Affordable Care Act—and now we all have to call it Obamacare most of the time just so people know what we’re talking about—but they’ve done nothing for years but try to repeal it while having no workable suggestion of how to replace the coverage it has provided. Individual states have also turned down the law’s Medicaid expansion and sabotaged its implementation in other ways that drove costs up.
If anything, Trump’s words have finally cut off the GOP from that strategy as more people realize that’s what’s going on. Then, the Congressional Budget Office released its assessment on the GOP’s current bill today, and they’ve come to the conclusion that 14 million people would drop off of insurance under the plan by 2018, and 24 million would be out by 2026. With both houses of Congress, the White House, and many states under their control, the GOP has no one to blame but themselves if the healthcare system gets worse while they try to “fix” it.
(via Mediaite, image via screengrab)
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