Over the weekend, popular vote loser Donald Trump promised he had a plan for replacing Obamacare, an as-of-yet secret plan. And fellow Republicans had better like it.
Trump warned Republicans that if the party splinters or slows his agenda, he is ready to use the power of the presidency — and Twitter — to usher his legislation to passage. […]
Trump said his plan for replacing most aspects of Obama’s health-care law is all but finished. Although he was coy about its details — “lower numbers, much lower deductibles” — he said he is ready to unveil it alongside Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). […]
For conservative Republicans dubious about his pledge to ensure coverage for millions, Trump pointed to several interviews he gave during the campaign in which he promised to “not have people dying on the street.”
“It’s not going to be their plan,” he said of people covered under the current law. “It’ll be another plan. But they’ll be beautifully covered. I don’t want single-payer. What I do want is to be able to take care of people,” he said Saturday.
Of course, there has yet to be a case of any nation providing universal "beautiful" coverage that's not a variation of single payer, built upon guaranteed universal access in which all the basics are provided by the government. That's just how the economics of healthcare works—in the reality in which we all live, you can't get there any other way. Trump's reality is obviously a different one.
So is Paul Ryan's.
In his reality, as long as there is some kind of "access" to healthcare, whether or not it's quality care and whether or not people can actually afford it, he's good. Because it really doesn't matter to him if you live or die on the street or otherwise. And in between them is Trump's new mouthpiece, Sean Spicer, who went on the TV Monday morning to try to bridge the gap between what Trump says and what Ryan will allow and came up with nonsense. Trump's goal, he said, is "to get insurance for everybody through marketplace solutions, through bringing costs down, through negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, allowing competition over state lines." As if Trump's vision and Ryan's vision aren't divergent and as if either were remotely realistic.
The key takeaway: Republicans in Congress have started the repeal snowball rolling—and none of them have any idea what's going to happen next.