‘Repeal and replace’ meets defeat.
GOP abandons health-care overhaul as Trump ultimatum fails to save it.
The decision to pull the bill from the House floor minutes before a scheduled vote was a dramatic acknowledgment that Republicans are unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The decision came a day after President Trump delivered an ultimatum to lawmakers — and the defeat represented multiple failures for the new president and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan.
Nothing has united Republicans more over the past seven years than their vow to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. But Trump provided little by way of specifics on how to do that.
MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS
Everyone, I think, was surprised by the vigor with which the public rose to the defense of the Affordable Care Act—hadn’t the press told us that the act was reviled?—at those mid-February town hall meetings that senators and congressmen held. Or failed to hold—a number of representatives and senators announced meetings and then, fearing that what they’d seen happen to their colleagues would fall on their heads, simply didn’t show up. I have a Facebook friend from my home state of West Virginia who kept posting about trying to see her Republican senator, Shelley Moore Capito, and her GOPrepresentative, David McKinley. Capito refused an invitation to attend a town hall meeting in Buckhannon, West Virginia, where citizens posed their questions to an empty chair. McKinley didn’t show up during his posted office hours, my friend wrote, and at length citizens were allowed to come in—two at a time—to meet with a staffer.
At the events that were held, what was notable was that the angry people were by and large white, and firmly middle-American, and a lot of them probably Republican. Chris Peterson is the sixty-two-year-old Iowa pig farmer who gained much press coverage by saying to GOP Senator Charles Grassley:
And Arkansan Kati McFarland described to her Republican senator, Tom Cotton, her family’s Republican, military, and NRA roots before telling him:And with all due respect, sir, you’re the man that talked about the death panels. We’re going to create one great big death panel in this country [because of the fact] that people can’t afford to get insurance.
Without the coverage for preexisting conditions, I will die. That is not hyperbole. I will die. Without the protections against lifetime coverage caps, I will die. Without the Obamacare exchange health care plan that I have elected to continue after my Cobra that is going to kick in after I turn twenty-six this coming Sunday, I will die.