BY: Matthew Continetti
March 24, 2017 5:21 pm
President Trump and his advisers ought to study the collapse of the American Health Care Act. It's
a case study in how Beltway institutions—the so-called Swamp Trump pledged to drain—
can herd a president and his party toward unpopular legislation and
political defeat.Begin with this question:
Why the rush to repeal and replace Obamacare?
The objective of the American Health Care Act was not to write into law the best possible conservative reform of health care. While I happen to think the bill had plenty of good stuff in it,
its main purpose was to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. That's why the bill failed to overturn Obamacare's regulatory structure:
House leadership didn't believe such reforms could pass the watchful eye of the Senate Parliamentarian. And when, late in the process, Senator Mike Lee of Utah suggested that the parliamentarian would allow deregulation in the bill, the situation became even more confusing.
The legislation was unpopular with the House Freedom Caucus and outside conservative groups when another D.C. institution,
the Congressional Budget Office, began to scare moderates. The coverage losses predicted by CBO forced Republican congressmen to face up to the fact that
universal coverage has never been a goal of the conservative movement or the GOP. The potential blowback from reductions in Medicaid rolls worried Republican legislators from Medicaid-heavy districts while the conservatives from safe seats argued that the bill did not go far enough.
The parliamentarian and CBO were a left-right combination that knocked the American Health Care Act to the ground. It never recovered.
http://freebeacon.com/columns/washington-handed-trump-first-defeat/
