Every time I hear Donald Trump promoting the current ACA repeal-and-replace efforts, I can’t help but recall an interview he gave on “60 Minutes” in 2015. “Everybody’s going to be taken care of, much better than they’re being taken care of now,” he proclaimed.
Many who voted for Donald Trump believed him when he described this vision of universal health care. How would he accomplish this? “I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people,” he claimed. What happened to this deal? I wish our president would stand behind these discarded promises.
Instead, he’s currently promoting the freshly unveiled Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), concocted in secret by 13 Republican male senators. This bill is meant to be an improvement on the House’s American Health Care Act — which my own congressman, Erik Paulsen, not only voted for, but actively promoted. Unfortunately, enactment of the BCRA would only benefit those who are young, healthy and have higher incomes, and would hurt those who are sick, those who are older, and those who have lower incomes. The BCRA would effectively take away healthcare from millions of Americans in order to give a massive tax cut to the wealthy.
This doesn’t sound like what Donald Trump promised in the past. I would suggest that the president and the Republicans in congress go back to the drawing board. This time, they should include not only Democrats in their discussion, but allow for input from the American people they purport to represent.
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Good post! Republicans might also want to imitate Obama’s behavior: he and his administration and Congressional leaders spent many months in 2009-2010 consulting closely with health care providers and insurers on how to address a true crisis in American health care. That’s why this originally-Republican plan we now call Obamacare has so many features that are treasured by Americans. Obama’s folks thought it out and worked with experts in something other than Senate Rules.
Neither Paul Ryan nor Mitch McConnell knows anything about health care, or maybe even how insurance works. (Let’s keep in mind: McConnell’s Group of Thirteen Men were not all Senators; many were simply aides.)