RIP, Trumpcare: How the Health Care Bill Crashed and Burned
Without so much as a vote, the Republican crusade to repeal and replace Obamacare has failed.
The House was supposed to vote Friday afternoon to advance Trumpcare to the Senate – where its fate was dodgy at best. Instead, at a bit after 3:30, Speaker Paul Ryan and President Trump pulled the bill. As Joe Biden might say, this is a big fucking deal.
It's hard to overstate the magnitude of this defeat. For seven years, almost to the day, the Republican Party has made repealing Obamacare the white whale of its legislative agenda. That hunt ended Friday – the whale in clear sight – without launching a single harpoon.
Like Speaker John Boehner before him, Paul Ryan found he could not bridge the ideological gap between the center and the far right of the GOP House. The first presentation of Trumpcare couldn't pass, because it was insufficiently hard-hearted for the far-right members of the Freedom Caucus. But as Trump and Ryan kept tweaking the bill to appease those hardliners – including by stripping away the essential benefit guarantees that health insurance plans in American must now cover – the bill lost supporters at the center, including the chair of the House Appropriations Committee. A winning vote count remained elusive – somewhere between a handful and a dozen votes short.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/rip-trumpcare-how-the-health-care-bill-crashed-and-burned-w473610?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=032717_12
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