QUESTION: Would REPUBLICANS Trash The Obamacare Replacement Bill — If Barack Obama Had Come Up with It?
My former Congressman, Republican Mike Coffman (CO-6) served in both the Army Reserve and Marine Corps. All reports indicate he served admirably, and he seems like a nice guy. At a town hall meeting in 2010, not long after Obamacare was passed by nothing but Democrats, I confronted Coffman because I wanted to know why the Republicans wouldn’t just stop money from going to Obamacare through the budget process, and actually use the power of the purse. My question to Coffman: “Symbolic though it may have been (if they didn’t have the votes), why didn’t you just vote to defund Obamacare, and stand up against this?”
Coffman’s answer: “I wanted to continue the debate.”
What debate? We didn’t, and still don’t, have the time.
Outside of his military service, this man has proven to be nothing but a colossal disappointment to his constituents and country. He is a terrible politician, and a coward. What’s worse is he represents virtually every Republican in both the House and the Senate, all of whom seem to believe healthcare has the same impact as naming a post office in central North Dakota. The truth is while they dawdle, many Americans will suffer because Obamacare is rotting the medical industry from the inside.
People like Tom Reed (R-NY) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) are perfectly fine with waiting::
“This is something that may need to put on the back burner … maybe next year to be dealt with,” Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) told The Hill.
Echoing Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) words from moments before, Reed said that “it’s clear votes aren’t there on repeal and replacement, so the bottom line is we’re going to have to continue with this policy of ObamaCare for foreseeable future.”
Maybe next year?
It isn’t just Congress that eschews the simple and direct approach of “repeal every word”. Even our Establishmentarian friends at National Review are big on taking sweet time:
Republicans more or less fell into a losing strategy. They began by thinking they could quickly repeal Obamacare and then replace it at leisure. To their credit, they substantially modified their plan in response to criticism, attempting to do portions of both repeal and replace in one bill. But this new approach was a bad fit for the old schedule. A viable repeal-and-replace plan could not be slapped together as fast as Republicans wanted to move.
“I think people with shorter attention spans get less and less patient every day. The most important thing about this is that we do it right.”
… “The fact is it took Obama 15 months to get Obamacare passed. No one should have expected that we were going to get it repealed and replaced in 60 days. So I think everybody needs to take a deep breath…”
… “There’s nine weeks down in this administration, 199 weeks to go in its first term. So let’s everybody take a bit of a deep breath and relax, okay? Stuff will get done.”
As Mark Levin pointed out, if the same, stupid bill the GOP created was put to a vote when Obama was president, every one of these politicians would be against it. This is not a hypothetical, since the Republican-created American Health Care Act is basically Obamacare. So why did they waste time with this monstrosity?
Does anyone believe the American people won’t cheer the entire Republican party if someone, anyone, brought a simple repeal bill that Trump actually signs into law?
What is the matter with you people?
Image: By Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead – Original source from Mike Pence’s official twitter, Alternative source at POTUS’ official facebook page, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57023533