decided on a two-part strategy. Republicans would repeal much of Obamacare early, using “reconciliation” procedures to allow a simple majority of the Senate to act without being filibustered by the Democratic minority. Later, they would repeal the rest of Obamacare and enact a replacement.
Republicans had already passed a reconciliation bill repealing Obamacare’s taxes and subsidies when President Obama was in office. (He vetoed it, of course.) Replacement would, on the other hand, require Republicans to overcome their disagreements.
.. It became clear, however, that McConnell’s plan would not work, in large part because insurance markets could collapse in the interim.
.. The House leaders devised a bill that they said accomplished as much of both repeal and replacement as the parliamentarian would allow.
.. many of the conservative critics, at least by the end of the debate over the bill, were willing to accept that tax credits were necessary. What continued to concern them was that so many of Obamacare’s regulations were left in place.
.. That problem could have been addressed by being less aggressive in rolling back Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid .. and by making the tax credits more generous to people with incomes a little too high for Medicaid and people nearing retirement.
.. Mike Lee of Utah, an ally of the Freedom Caucus, reported that the parliamentarian had told him that nobody had asked her about the permissibility of some specific deregulatory steps
.. What it really shows, above all, is that legislating is easier when you have 60 rather than 52 senators on your side. The Democrats had a much freer hand in making regulatory changes when they passed Obamacare
.. During the campaign he had a brief outline of a plan that made little sense, and he dropped it in favor of letting the Congress come up with something.
.. Nothing is stopping the Republicans from spending the next year hammering out a bill that they like better, refining it as they go so that it enables more people to buy coverage they actually want.
.. Most Republicans now embrace moving toward a market in which all Americans have the option to buy renewable catastrophic coverage and in which such coverage competes with more comprehensive plans on a level playing field.
Sen. Mike Lee goes on epic rant about Donald Trump
“Hey look, Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Trump,” Lee (R-Utah) told NewsMaxTV host Steve Malzberg. “We can get into that if you want. We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK. We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. A people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And, statements like that make them nervous.”