Why is the Republican Party having a Groundhog Day experience on health care, with its House leaders continuing to push for a bill only to go through the same cycle of having their own members rebel?
Because top Republicans still aren’t willing to grapple with reality.
They have spent years pretending that it’s easy to fix the health care system and lying about both Obamacare and their own proposals. They’re still doing it.
.. Ryan insisted — with no factual basis — that the new bill would protect the sick.
GOP Health-Care Push Falls Short Again
House Republicans fail to round up enough votes to pass legislation before Trump’s 100-day mark
GOP lawmakers’ hopes had risen this week when Rep. Tom MacArthur (R., N.J.) introduced an amendment that won over many of the House’s most conservative Republicans.
.. “Protections for those with pre-existing conditions without contingency and affordable access to coverage for every American remain my priorities for advancing health-care reform, and this bill does not satisfy those benchmarks for me,”
.. The bill also would significantly cut spending for Medicaid, a major concern of centrist Republicans in both the House and Senate.
.. With federal waivers, states could let insurers charge higher premiums to some people with pre-existing conditions. That would apply only to people who had let their coverage lapse, a measure that aims to ensure people stay insured. And the higher premiums would generally only last for about 12 months before decreasing.
.. House leaders had argued that GOP lawmakers in tight races next year would benefit from having kept their repeated campaign pledges to repeal the ACA.
“We promised that we would do this,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) said Thursday. “If you violate your promise, if you commit the sin of hypocrisy in politics, that’s the greater risk, I think, to a person’s seat.”
Republicans exempt their own insurance from their latest health care proposal
Obamacare requires all members of Congress and their staff to purchase coverage through the health law’s marketplace, just like Obamacare enrollees. The politics of that plank were simple enough, meant to demonstrate that if the coverage in this law were good enough for Americans, it should be good enough for their representatives in Washington.
That’s been happening for the past four years now. Fast-forward to this new amendment, which would allow states to waive out of key Obamacare protections like the ban on preexisting conditions or the requirement to cover things like maternity care and mental health services... If congressional aides lived in a state that decided to waive these protections, the aides who were sick could presumably be vulnerable to higher premiums than the aides who are healthy. Their benefits package could get skimpier as Obamacare’s essential health benefits requirement may no longer apply either.
Border Lawmakers Balk at Donald Trump’s Wall Request
No House or Senate members from the region express support for the funding proposal
Not a single member of Congress who represents the territory on the southwest border said they support President Donald Trump’s request for $1.4 billion to begin construction of his promised wall, according to a Wall Street Journal survey.. That includes nine members of the House and eight senators across four states: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California... Many Republicans responded that the Trump approach is overly focused on a physical barrier rather than other approaches to border security, such as technology, that experts say can be more effective and less expensive... in an interview, she said walls do little to stop criminal organizations from getting across the border. “They will go over, through or under physical barriers, sometimes pretty quickly,” she said... Mr. Hurd, whose district includes 800 miles along the border, describes a wall as “the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.”.. “The idea of a wall sounds good as campaign rhetoric, but the campaign is over and we need to offer the American people real solutions, not a false sense of security,” Mr. Gonzalez said.