The Health Care Debacle

Have you finally had it yet — with the incompetence and dysfunction; the war on truth; the conflicts of interest; the irresponsibility; the ties to Russia’s criminal regime; the just plain craziness?

It would be a joke if it weren’t sickening. The one signature Republican campaign promise — indeed, a downright hysterical vow — to repeal Obamacare — they’ve fluffed. Over seven years, they voted around 50 times to repeal it, just phony posturing without control of the White House. Now they do control it, plus the Senate and House, and they can’t even manage to get to a vote.*

And blame the Democrats! Trump’s fulminating afterwards was simply deranged, saying “explosion” of the health insurance system (a wild exaggeration) will be their problem (“now they own it”), and they’re bound to come running to the White House to make a deal to fix it. As if the Great Deal Maker could consummate a deal with Democrats when he couldn’t even do it among his own Republicans. And as if Democrats control Congress. And as if it’s not actually the Republicans’ problem because they’re the ones in charge now.

Indeed, Trump even says failure of his very bad health care bill may be a good thing, not because it was a bad bill, but because now we can (somehow, later) get that beautiful, tremendous, wonderful program he’s still bizarrely fantasizing about. As if he actually had any idea what such a program might actually be, never mind how to get it passed.

And never mind about health care anyway now. After seven years of obsessing about it, why, we’ll just forget about it and move on. To tax reform, perhaps. That should be easy enough to solve, right?

Before his health bill collapsed, Trump had lamented, “It’s all politics.” Well, duh. The problem is that this asinine blowhard came in with zero understanding of the political system, his ego too inflated to imagine he needed to learn anything, believing he knows everything, and all our problems are because everybody else is just stupid.

We’ve elected an insane creep as president. Doing so was insane. How does this end? How much damage will it first do to America, and the world?

* I was actually hoping they’d at least ditch the tax penalty, which would have helped me and my wife. But not even that could they accomplish.