And the entire Republican party’s a**, too. This is one of those major stories that has been neglected for years while the media obsesses over Babblin’ Trump’s tweets.
Let’s do a quick review of the history.
The Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 10, 2010 by President Barack Obama, officially giving something never before heard of in healthcare – guaranteed coverage for persons with pre-existing conditions, the bête noire of every insurance company. Immediately, repealing Obamacare became the sacred mission of the GOP. They fought tooth and toenail to take that Satan-inspired coverage away. They tried lawsuits, misinformation campaigns, even anti-Obamacare websites.
How many times did they vote to repeal the ACA while Obama was still president? A Newsweek article estimated 67 attempts over more than six years.
How many times did they vote to repeal Obamacare since Trump became president? Officially 3 times over nearly four years.
And the most important number of all? Let me quote Newsweek on that: “Of the 70 documented attempts to repeal Obamacare, one statistic is indisputable: zero have been successful.”
Sooo, what happened?
The short answer is Obama’s healthcare law has been a remarkable success
It gave coverage to more than 20 million Americans, including anti-Obamacare stalwarts Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio. It gave health insurance to people who had never had health insurance before, not in all their lives. In addition, it pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, becoming one of the principal drivers of Real President Obama’s remarkable seven years of recovery from the disaster he inherited from Bush.
It also has proved remarkably tough to kill. Fake President Trump has ranted about it, cut funding for it, issued executive orders against it, all to no avail. Even canceling the individual mandate didn’t stop it. The ‘Obamacare death spiral’ every Republican talked about for years never happened. That claim proved as false as Trump’s ‘beautiful healthcare plan that is coming in two weeks.’
And if you think a**-kicking is too strong a phrase to describe what happened, let me give you some more details.
Obama got a super majority and put his groundbreaking new law through despite everything the ‘We Put Insurance Companies First’ Party could do. Think about those 67 anti-healthcare votes over the space of 6 years and ten months. That’s an average of ten a year.
The most interesting thing about all those votes is they knew in advance that every one of them would fail. They didn’t care. Just the opposite, they were ecstatic every time they were stopped. It gave them the best of both worlds. If they actually repealed the ACA then they would have to come up with a replacement, and as became blindingly obvious to the rest of us years ago, they never had one. This way they could put up a big show of fighting the law without having to worry about what they would do if they actually won. Hence the 67 votes against Obamacare, averaging ten a year. Those votes would be what Michael Ontkean’s character in the move “Slap Shot” described as garbage goals.
To any Republican reading this who says “We did too have a plan,” I say,” Really?”
Remember Romney and Ryan back in 2012 promising every person in the country that they had a Republican healthcare plan all written down and ready to go in 2013? When asked to show what they had they said “You’ll see it after the election.” Sound familiar? Their slogan was Repeal and Replace. That slogan all by itself gave away their no-plan plan. If you actually have a plan, you don’t need to repeal anything. You simply replace it with the new plan. Doing a repeal first means you don’t have a replacement ready yet.
Yes, the Party Of No Ideas never had a plan, and they didn’t care, either. For them it was all about acting tough, putting on a big show for their corporate sponsors. They were like a boxer who loses the big fight and then hangs around the stadium parking lot telling his fans what he was going to do in the rematch: “I’m gonna whip him in the first round. I’m gonna send him home crying to his mother. Just you wait and see.”
And it worked, at least at first. The ‘How Low Can We Go For the Rich‘ Party made a big comeback in the midterms. They still couldn’t repeal Obamacare, but they could spend the next six years sabotaging the agenda of the two-time choice of the majority of all American voters.
Then the worst thing possible happened. They won the White House.
After years of sitting on the sidelines tooting their kazoos about what they were going to do when they got the chance, they finally got that chance. The ‘I Was Just Being Sarcastic’ Party was back in the ring for the rematch it had been begging for. What happened wasn’t pretty.
The good news was we finally got to see the Ryan healthcare plan. The bad news was it turned out to be a Power Point slide show.
Are you kidding me? Their grand plan to solve the all of the nation’s healthcare problems was a slide show? How long was it, like twelve slides? Could you be more pathetic, Paul Ryan?
We all know how well that master plan went over. It didn’t go over, of course, at least not at first. Ryan ended up withdrawing the bill. But they didn’t give up. They made a big push, their Battle of the Somme, their every body out of the trenches and into no-man’s land, boys. They were going to win this war or else.
It looked like they had, too, when loyal Republican John McCain got up out of his sick bed to rush to the Senate and cast the deciding vote.
But then he gave that vote, and what a vote it was. The Senator gave a thumbs down, literally, and made a live show of it on national television. Oh, Donald, if only you hadn’t mocked the years of torture McCain suffered as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. Your disgusting off-hand remark cost you dearly on that day. McCain not only killed Trumpcare, he buried it with a stake through its heart.
And so, just six months into the Trump presidency, our ‘No Promise Left Unmade’ President’s pledge to work a healthcare miracle turned into a smoking pile of ashes. What a humiliation for The Donald, and a personal humiliation for Donald Trump Party Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Trump can ignore setbacks. He just pretends they never happened. Mitch is different. He wasn’t about to go through anything like that again. After that debacle McConnell refused to even consider trying to keep any more of the President’s promises.
Money for the wall? Forget it. An infrastructure plan? Get lost. A rewrite of the immigration laws? Don’t hold your breath. Most of Trump’s agenda died the day he lost that vote. Only the parts McConnell wanted were carried through.
To add injury to insult, then came the 2018 midterms, where we made a surprising discovery. It turns out Americans like having healthcare insurance. Those people who never had it before and who had it now did not want to give it up. Go figure. The Republicans found themselves furiously backpedaling on their repellent pledge to repeal, all to no avail. The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in what, if I remember correctly, was a record turnout for a midterm. The Destroy Obamacare crusade the Greedy Old Party had previously used to gain power came back to bite them, like the frozen snake the old lady brought into her house.
The irony. The irony.
They lost the House and now they are in danger of losing the Senate. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the anti-Obamacare campaign has become an albatross around the ‘Anti-Ordinary People’ Party’s neck. They’re afraid to even talk about it, or at least most of them are.
To summarize the matter in scientific terms, when it comes to healthcare, Republican President Donald Trump and the entire Donald Trump Republican party have been Obama-whipped. The ex-President’s once controversial ACA became a smashing success at improving the health of the nation, smashing in that in accomplished so much and smashing in that so far it has smashed every attempt to remove it.
Obama kicked all of their a**es, the entire compassion-forsaken party. Every Republican who previously condemned what they called Obamacare’s business-destroying provision to cover pre-existing conditions is now singing its praises and adopting it as their own. The best part is the Majority President didn’t even have to be there while it happened. While Donald Weak Ankles was busy shooting off all of his toes, Barack was relaxing on vacation islands.
How does the Great Trumpini explain everything?
“Did I say I was against pre-existing conditions? Fake news! I was being sarcastic. I was never against pre-existing conditions. I was the one who gave all of you pre-existing conditions. I was the one who told Obama to put it in, put in the pre-existing conditions. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t even have it. The fake news never reports that.”
(Question: Was any of that paragraph real, or did I just make up what Dishonest Don was saying. You have to stop and think about that, don’t you?}
But it’s not over yet. When the Republicans left the field they retreated to the jungle, a jungle called the Federalist Society, where they have been busy appointing surrogates to carry on a new phase of the war, a guerilla war in the courts. But that’s a subject for another post.