Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week that Republicans were serious about putting an Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill on the president’s desk in the very near future. In an interview with Fox News, McConnell said he hopes to see lawmakers take action on the bill “within the next month to six weeks.”
McConnell said the final product would have to be agreed upon by himself, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and President Donald Trump.
“We won the election, and with winning the election comes a responsibility to produce results,” McConnell said. “And we feel that Obamacare is a disaster and needs to be changed.”
Well said, although…we’re starting to get an uneasy feeling about all of this.
Republicans have been winning the Obamacare “messaging” war for six years. Unfortunately, they collectively failed to find any way to challenge it when Obama was president. And now that they have the power to do what they always said they wanted to do…they have begun to lose the messaging war. What’s more, we’re starting to wonder if they really have the guts to go through with this at all.
Privately, we can only speculate about the problem. Perhaps Republicans are coming to the realization that this will be tougher than they thought. Maybe they just can’t quite get on the same page. Maybe they’ve made one or two promises they now wish they hadn’t.
But publicly, their failure is obvious. They are failing to challenge this myth that Obamacare has made this country a better place. They are failing to challenge these myths that Obamacare has saved lives. These myths are based on flawed studies and unfair comparisons that obscure the truth, which is that Obamacare has likely made no difference whatsoever in lowering the American mortality rate.
Beyond that, they are losing grip on the fundamental argument against this law, which is that the federal government should have no right to FORCE Americans to buy a private product like health insurance. This law was never meant to “succeed.” This law was destined to fail – designed to fail – so that the next Democratic president could use it as a stepping stone to Universal Health Care.
It WILL fail, regardless of what Republicans do or don’t do in the next six weeks. If they replace it beforehand, great. If they don’t, they will be forced into crisis-control mode, giving Democrats a lot more power than they have now.
The clock is ticking. We sincerely hope the GOP hears it.
