"It appears to me that the Republican Establishment Machine is preparing to put Congressional Conservatives in a very bad position… vote for the "Obamacare Lite" proposed by the Establishment or be stuck with Obamacare as it stands now."
That quote was the closing paragraph to an article I published here on The Minuteman on March 6th. And Thursday, President Donald Trump threatened as much… accept the American Health Care Act (AHCA) or live with Obamacare. Then, after being unable to convince members of the Freedom Caucus to abandon their principled stance yesterday, the AHCA was pulled for lack of support just as Trump said it would be.
The decision to withdraw the AHCA led House Speaker Paul Ryan to say, “We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.” Predictable for sure.
Thursday was the seven year anniversary of the signing of Obamacare into law. After seven years, over 50 attempts to repeal it, and a plethora of campaign promises to rid the country of the healthcare monstrosity; you’d think that the GOP leadership could have done better than what many have called "Obamacare 2.0" or "Obamacare Lite".
Call me a skeptic – I most certainly am – but I’m just not convinced President Trump was as committed to eliminating Obamacare as some people may have been led to believe that he is. In the past, he unabashedly supported a single payer plan. Could it be that that he sees the failure of the AHCA as a mere formality in which he can claim he tried to keep his campaign promise to repeal and replace, but was stifled? He admitted yesterday that he will now wait until Obamacare implodes (which it will). And once it implodes, perhaps his hope is that single payer is more palatable to the electorate?
I won’t pretend to know exactly where this is going to go, but I fear it’s not a good place. Eventually the American people, as a whole, are going to beg for something different. When that time comes, I believe there will be only two ways we can go… all out socialist single payer or Free Market healthcare.
Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation summed up the problem with government’s meddling in healthcare this way:
"There is just one big problem, however, with whatever reform plan conservatives come up with: It’s not going to work. Like every other healthcare reform plan that has been enacted since the 1960s, it will produce new crises, which will cause people to demand new reforms. It’s a never-ending process. The end of the road, of course, will be a complete government takeover of healthcare, just like in Cuba and China."
So, then, what is the solution? I suggested that in my March 6th article as well… it’s called the Free Market. Hornberger summed up the solution this way:
"There is one — and only one — solution to America’s healthcare woes. That solution does not involve reform of America’s socialist and interventionist healthcare system. Instead, the only solution is a total separation of healthcare and the state — i.e., the end of all government involvement in healthcare — a total free-market healthcare system."
Think of it; the likely purpose of Obamacare in the first place was to get us to a single payer system in the end, which may be exactly what we some day get… quite possibly from a "Republican" President of all things. My oh my… how far the party has drifted.
Sources:
1. https://theminutemanblog.com/single-post/2017/03/06/Obamacare-Establishment-RINOs-vs-Congressional-Conservatives
2. http://www.fff.org/2017/01/05/one-healthcare-solution/
