posted 03-24-2017 04:52 PM                  

http://news.grabien.com/story-trump-what-will-happen-i-think-obamacare-unfortunately- will

TRUMPCARE AND THE DANGERS OF CATASTROPHIC VICTORY
Everybody talks about who will take the blame if TrumpCare fails in the House today. What they ought to be talking about is who would get the blame if it passed.

Politics is a business obsessed with short-term thinking and an emphasis on tactics rather than strategy, and boy howdy has that been on display in Washington in the less than three weeks since Republicans plopped out their health insurance overhaul plan.

If you wanted evidence of how bad this city’s attention deficit disorder is, just think about that for a second: It’s only been 19 days, and we are already fatigued with the discussion about an issue so enormous.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer lamented today, “At some point there’s a political cost to dragging this out.” It would seem that “dragging out” ain’t what it used to be.

It took 16 weeks to draft the Constitution and another 40 weeks to ratify it. If American politicians had to do it today, they’d fight for a month and then just copy and paste a script from “Schoolhouse Rock.”

We are told by the NYT that as the bill began to collapse, the president and his advisers were getting ready to unsurprisingly, shank Speaker Paul Ryan like a prison-yard canary.

Several other outlets have reported that the blame for the bill’s failure would be laid at the feet of conservative members who refused President Trump’s repeated overtures to pass his first legislative initiative.

Now c’mon, people… We know that in politics, 72 hours can feel like an eternity, but how long really do you think the blame for the death of a broadly unpopular bill with no core constituency of its own would linger?

Yes, it’s embarrassing whenever you try and fail at legislation, especially when it’s the first one out of the chute for a president in his first 100 days. Democrats and the pundit class would declare Trump a lame duck already and howl over his failure.

But do you think anybody would still be talking much about it by this time next week? By Wednesday? Monday?

The post-mortems would fade into background noise and the attention would turn to the ongoing battle over Russian interference and Obama administration surveillance, as well as the locked-and-loaded tax plan Trump has been dying to release. It would be hard to imagine the demise of TrumpCare lasting long as a topic discussion.

The reason is simple: nobody wants the thing, apparently including its creators.

And it’s not just that the bills is broadly unpopular. It’s even unpopular with Trump’s core supporters. As Harry Enten observes, “Right now, though, the share of Hillary Clinton voters who oppose the Republican bill is much larger than the share of Donald Trump voters who support it.”

It may stand as a failure for the ages that Republicans did not manage to come up with a real replacement of their own in the seven years they spent railing against the many malignancies of ObamaCare.

But nothing is going to change that now, and, as Rich Lowry points out it’s not like good options abounded for the GOP.

Here’s the essential choice: Republicans can keep ObamaCare and admit defeat, learning to live with a new social welfare program and expansive federal regulation of insurance. Or, the GOP can take possession of a stingier version that simultaneously offends the consciences of conservatives while offending the well-being of many of the same working-class voters who put the GOP in total control of Washington.

The third option, which has been a fetishistic obsession among the think-tank set, was a radical remaking of the system with broad, fundamental changes to the way insurance and health care function.

The moment Trump won the Republican nomination, that sucker was off the table.

We have seen Republicans learn to live with the unthinkable before. Never forget that “budget sequestration” was designed as a doomsday punishment to force both parties to the table for a grand fiscal bargain.

It didn’t take many months for the GOP to be claiming it was good policy.

As Cousin Eddie Johnson told Clark Griswold, “I don’t know why they call this stuff Hamburger Helper. It does just fine all by itself, huh?”

Faced with another chance to serve red meat, this time on health care, Republicans again preferred an all-filler product.

Let’s say that the bill passed and, like the Democrats before them, Republicans found themselves as the progenitors of unpopular legislation in need of constant reform and adjustment.

Picture the 2018 midterms with raucous town halls and anguished legislators explaining why they voted for a bill they knew was flawed. Then jump to the 2020 election being litigated around the question of whether to repair or replace TrumpCare.

Trust us: There would be no question who got the blame then: The guy with his name at the top of the ticket.

Trump has long claimed that his preferred strategy was to simply let ObamaCare collapse and deliver ruination to its beneficiaries, thereby evading responsibility for the issue entirely, and forcing Democrats to the bargaining table under adverse circumstances.

That probably wasn’t a real option in the sense that voters would blame the party in power for problems with any law, especially that party had the opportunity to fix.

But what most voters might not blame Trump and his party for, however, is continuing to kick the can on ObamaCare.

Maybe if they call it “Health Insurance Sequestration” they can get the House on board.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/24/trumpcare-and-dangers-catastrophic-victory.html