A funny thing happened to Paul Ryan on his way to the American Enterprise Institute to tout his "new" Obamacare replacement "plan:" House Democrats stole his thunder by doing something actually compelling, something that might just lead to Congress doing something about gun safety. Well, he's not going to let that happen again!
"We are not going to handle it the same way," Ryan said Sunday on WISN's "UpFront with Mike Gousha." "We will not take this. We will not tolerate this."
What exactly is he going to do about it? "Ryan would not say specifically." Okay then. So what about that big plan no one was paying attention to? As HuffPo health writers Jonathon Cohn and Jeffrey Young write, "Speaker Paul Ryan wants to replace 20 million people's health insurance with 37 pages of talking points." Two of those 37 pages are blank, by the way.
The plan, which isn't legislation and is more like a mission statement, lacks the level of detail that would enable a full analysis, but one thing is clear: If put in place, it would almost surely mean fewer people with health insurance, fewer people getting financial assistance for their premiums or out-of-pocket costs, and fewer consumer protections than the ACA provides. […]
The health care rollout is part of Ryan's "A Better Way" initiative to define GOP policy during the election year.
But the contents of the plan amount to a grab-bag of conservative health policy ideas from the last few decades—virtually none of which have ever been pursued aggressively by Republicans in Congress or the White House—despite the House GOP having years since the ACA took effect to concoct a full-fledged alternative.
This Republican “plan” was six years in the making and all we've really got is 20 million people potentially losing their health care. Ryan should be begging House Democrats to do something to distract the nation from that fact.