Donald Trump was right. Health care is complicated. How complicated, even I didn’t know until, by some coincidence, I started reading Steven Brill’s extensively titled though well worth reading America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System just as House Speaker Paul “Lyin’ Paulie Ryan” Ryan began his so far disastrous rollout of “Trumpcare” (or, possibly, “LyinPaulieRyancare”).
You may remember how, back in 2010, Scott Brown’s stunning upset win in the special election held in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat deprived Democrats of their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate, seemingly dooming their efforts to finally achieve their dream, which they often did not dream of very hard, of universal health care. However, as Brill tells it, it was Brown’s victory that made the passage of what became Obamacare possible.
According to Brill, the competing bills passed by the Democrats in the House and Senate were so far apart—the House version being too liberal, and the Senate’s too conservative—that no compromise seemed possible. But Brown’s victory meant that the Senate bill was the best that could be had, and it could be had if the House passed it, if accompanied by a sufficient amount of parliamentary legerdemain, which was supplied, much to the outrage of the Republicans, who were of course clogging the basic legislative process with their own unscrupulous parliamentary legerdemain, the filibuster, once a notorious legislative rarity but now become the first order of Senate business.1
Obamacare proved to be the gift that keeps on giving for the Republicans, wounding the Democrats in 2010, 2014, and 2016, 2012 being the outlier both because Obamacare was closely based on “Romneycare”, the state health insurance program Mitt Romney sponsored as governor of Massachusetts, and because the Obama administration deliberately kept the implementation of Obamacare on the backburner, if indeed not in the deep freeze, until after Obama was re-elected.
But now the Republicans are discovering that killing Obamacare may be as politically costly as it was to enact it. The Republicans’ woes form a satisfying mirror image to the Democrats’ prior agony, as a right-wing Republican House and a moderate Republican Senate war furiously over what the new legislation should contain, with Donald Trump lying his ass off as usual, in the middle. It’s very much up in the air whether the Republicans pass anything at all. To which a Democrat can only say “Ha Ha”. Gee, maybe Nancy Pelosi was right when she said “once people find out what’s in the bill they’re going to like it.”2
- My own opinion is that the filibuster, which is not part of the Constitution, should be dropped, but it’s obviously important to senators, because both Sen. Harry Reid and Sen. Mitch McConnell, neither of whom is averse to winning ugly, have kept it as majority leader. ↩︎
- In DC, anything that can be taken out of context and be misunderstood will be taken out of context and be misunderstood, often “innocently,” because people have radically different perspectives. Pelosi didn’t mean “no one knows what’s in this bill”. She meant “people are going to judge this bill by its results, not its text, and the results are going to be good.” ↩︎
