Kudos to Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain for refusing to vote ‘yes’ for a bill that their own party leadership publicly acknowledged to be a fraud.
But I’m not gloating, and here’s why. It seems to me that the real reason the Republicans couldn’t come up with a replacement to the ACA (and they had eight years to work on it) is that the ACA is a Republican plan. Remember “RomneyCare” - the model for the ACA?
The ACA indeed expands coverage but it also keeps the more-or-less free market and for-profit and irrational health care financing system in place (See “Health Insurance Roulette: The House Always Wins“). It has been a bonanza for health insurance companies and for many hospitals. It allows for distinctions in the worthiness of patients: private insurance vs. Medicaid, with many health care providers refusing to take Medicaid patients. And with the Supreme Court ruling that states’ do not have to expand Medicaid, the ACA has not expanded access to care in many states (See “The State(s) of the Affordable Care Act.”)
The president and HHS Secretary Tom Price (see “The Price of Health“) have a lot of power to undermine the ACA. That’s something they’ve already begun doing: in Trump’s words, allowing the ACA to “implode”. While I don’t necessarily believe everything Trump says, I am inclined to take his word on this. Yes, we all know by now that Trump doesn’t have any particular health care policy that he knows about or supports. But he clearly can’t stand that the very popular ACA is named for his predecessor in office.