The reason the ACA bill failed is because it did not go far enough in wiping out Obamacare. Even the Koch brothers were against it.
Trump can just let Obamacare implode, it has been on life support for years. Many counties only have one provider so NO choice and some counties had NO provider at all.
Wait until a couple more insurance companies pull out and millions more will not be able to buy Obamacare.
"The 5 biggest disagreements Republicans have on Obamacare"
January 22, 2017 1:45 PM
VIDEO - {watch again the president doing about the only thing he understands about governance, signing .. at least one he he didn't understand at all] President Donald Trump signs his first executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on Friday. Trump signed the confirmations of Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, and an executive order requiring federal agencies to ease the economic burden of the Affordable Care Act until it is repealed. C-SPAN
The Observer editorial board
As Republicans have begun dismantling the Affordable Care Act, they’ve been met with a backlash that might be surprising to some. It shouldn’t be.
Americans have, for quite a while, been clear about wanting to keep at least some of the benefits that Obamacare provides. Now, more Americans favor the law than oppose it, according to a new poll .. http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2017/images/01/18/congress,.aca.pdf .
Why? It’s not just the benefits that most people know about – coverage for millions more Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions. It’s also because the Affordable Care Act has improved the insurance landscape in many, quieter ways.
That might be easy to forget after years of Republicans calling Obamacare a failure. So here’s a reminder of what life was like before the Affordable Care Act:
People thought the health care system was terrible: For years, even decades, before Obamacare, Americans wanted health care and insurance reform. By 2008, health care costs were skyrocketing and insurance plans seemed to cover less and less – and that was if you were lucky enough to afford coverage.
That’s why a vast majority of Americans – including 82 percent in one 2008 poll – wanted the health care system to be overhauled.
Premiums were going up rapidly: Between 2000 and 2010, average family premiums for employer coverage grew 8 percent per year – a perpetual burden on Americans’ budgets. From 2010 to 2016, that same average has grown at a slower 5 percent a year.
Hundreds of thousands of people were afraid to change jobs: It’s a phenomenon called “job lock” – people being afraid to leave their corporate jobs and go out on their own because doing so meant walking away from affordable premiums. For some, the risk was even greater; if you had a pre-existing condition, insurance companies could refuse to sell you coverage. No longer.
Women got fewer mammograms: According to a study published this month in the journal Cancer .. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.30476/full , more women of all income and education levels got screened for breast cancer once Obamacare eliminated the out-of-pocket costs for the test. While there’s no way to know for sure if the ACA was the reason behind the increase (colonoscopy screenings did not see a similar rise), it makes sense that removing the financial barrier for cancer screenings and flu shots would result in more preventive care – and a healthier, less-costly population.
Women paid more than men: Before Obamacare, women buying insurance on the individual market were often charged more than men. The practice was known as “gender rating.” The ACA made that illegal.
There were more hospital mistakes: After Obamacare offered incentives for hospitals to avoid readmissions and harm to patients, hospital readmissions for Medicare beneficiaries dropped 8 percent. That translates into 565,000 fewer readmissions, according the Department of Health and Human Services.
Obamacare has brought other benefits for Americans, such as lowering prescription drug costs for some, and putting an end to annual and lifetime limits on coverage. Is the ACA perfect? Far from it. But as Republicans float various ways to replace it, they’re finding that Americans’ memories are getting clearer. Obamacare is not a failure. It’s an improvement.
"The 5 biggest disagreements Republicans have on Obamacare"
Saturday, March 25, 2017
House Speaker Paul Ryan, in his press conference following the demise of his bill to replace Obamacare, blamed Republicans who had failed to grasp that the GOP was now a “governing party.”
“We were a 10-year opposition party, where being against things was easy to do,” said Ryan. “You just had to be against it. Now, in three months’ time, we tried to go to a governing party where we actually had to get 216 people to agree with each other on how we do things.”
It was, he said, “the growing pains of government.”
Rubbish.
Apparently Ryan doesn’t grasp that he put forward a terrible bill to begin with. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it would have resulted in 24 million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, hardly make a dent in the federal debt, and transfer over $600 billion to the wealthiest members of American society.
The so-called “Freedom Caucus” of House Republicans, who refused to go along with the bill, wanted it even worse. Essentially, their goal (and that of their fat-cat patrons) was to repeal the Affordable Care Act without replacing it at all.
Ryan is correct about one thing. Congress is in the hands of Republicans who for years have only said “no.” They have become expert at stopping whatever a president wants to do but they don’t have a clue how to initiate policy.
Most of the current Republican House members have not shared responsibility for governing the nation. They have never even passed a budget into law.
But their real problem isn’t the “growing pains” of being out of power. In reality, the Republicans who are now control the House – as well as the Senate – don’t like government. They’re temperamentally and ideologically oriented to opposing it, not leading it.
Their chronic incapacity to govern didn’t reveal itself as long as a Democrat was in the White House. They let President Obama try to govern, and pretended that their opposition was based on a different philosophy governing.
Now that they have a Republican president, they can no longer hide. They have no philosophy of governing at all.
Sadly for them – and for the rest of the country, and the world – the person they supported in the election of 2016 and who is now president is an unhinged narcissistic child who tweets absurd lies and holds rallies to prop up his fragile ego.
His conflicts of financial interest are legion. His entire presidency is under a “gray cloud” of suspicion for colluding with Russian agents to win office.
Here’s a man who’s advised by his daughter, his son-in-law, and an oddball who once ran a white supremacist fake-news outlet.
His Cabinet is an assortment of billionaires, CEOs, veterans of Wall Street, and ideologues, none of whom has any idea about how to govern and most of whom don’t believe in the laws their departments are in charge of implementing anyway.
Meanwhile, he has downgraded or eviscerated groups of professionals responsible for giving presidents professional advice on foreign policy, foreign intelligence, economics, science, and domestic policy.
He gets most of what he learns from television.
So we have a congress with no capacity to govern, and a president who’s incapable of governing.
Which leaves the most powerful nation in the world rudderless.
The country on whom much of the rest of the world relies for organizing and mobilizing responses to the major challenges facing humankind is leaderless.
It is of course possible that Republicans in congress will learn to take responsibility for governing. It is possible that Donald Trump will learn to lead. It is possible that pigs will learn to fly.
But such things seem doubtful. Instead, America and the rest of the world must hold our collective breath, hoping that the next elections – the midterms of 2018 and then the presidential election of 2020 – set things right. And hoping that in the meantime nothing irrevocably awful occurs.
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