Well, they passed the bill. Honestly, I’m shocked – the bill was so hastily constructed there was no budget analysis. Many of the people who voted for it had never read it. This whole debacle has convinced me that the Republicans have no scruples. I used to think they had a different (possibly faulty) ideology but that they were sincere in their beliefs. This seems like the height of cynicism.
It’s a sad day. Hopefully this piece of crap bill is going to be DOA in the Senate.
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well, the political factors are going to make the Republicans in the Senate really reluctant to not at least *attempt to work with this bill even though they have no desire to touch it.
Basically House and Senate Republicans are playing a horrible game of hot potato. Nobody wants the responsibility of passing a bill that will strip coverage from millions. Nobody wants to be blamed for “failing” to pass a repeal bill. House Republicans passed something they knew was terrible and are now punting to the next side, hoping that they can say they “tried” to repeal Obamacare but that their butts will be saved by the Senate declining to take it up.
I doubt a Senate bill could be as horrible, but this will put pressure on them to come up with something and at this point I don’t have great confidence in anyone in government to use common sense.
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The fact that every major Health Organization spoke in opposition to this bill spoke volumes to me. This bill hurts everyone and removes every good thing that was part of the ACA. if this bill passes everyone in this community is going to be directly impacted whether you have employer-based health care or not
Just one word: disgraceful
as long as the top 1% get their tax break that’s all that matters
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Actually, if it ends up repealing the POC the dems rammed through with all of its special interest crap baked in, that is turning out to be the ruination of health care in this country, then it will turn out to be a good thing. Hopefully it will end up good enough to fix the rough edges.
@TiaG I’m not saying the Republicans are saints, but there was not a single Republican vote for that piece of garbage legislation that absolutely destroyed a perfectly good health care system. If you want to blame someone for our current health care problems, blame Pelosi, Reid and Obama.
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There’s no doubt in my mind the democrats severely messed up the entire healthcare system with the ACA… I don’t think this is anywhere near the right course to fix it though
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@Sam I fully agree. I’m certainly not sure it’s any better than ACA. I’m just hoping it’s fixable. Tom Price is a good man, and he will have a big hand in developing the details.
I’m really unsure what you mean by that – this bill passed with zero Democratic votes and 20 ‘No’ votes from Republicans. So how is that any different from the tally on Obamacare – in my opinion it’s clearly worse as it doesn’t even have the unified support of one party.
Have you read the bill, by the way? It cannot actually remove all the infrastructure of Obamacare. That requires 60 votes in the Senate, which they do not have. So instead they’re using a reconciliation process which means they can’t actually create law that does not directly pertain to spending, which means all the special interest stuff is still there, by the way. From the conservative perspective, It does nothing to curtail medical costs, provides paltry funding for conservatives’ vaunted health savings accounts, and is a huge giveaway for insurance companies, who now can charge whatever they like for all the sickest patients. Talk about caving to special interests – the way this bill passed was by making things easy on insurance companies, which can now revert to their prior method of ditching all the sick people from their plans.
For some of my reporting work I’ve spoken to several people from conservative and libertarian think tanks (Cato, Heritage, Acton, etc. etc.) and they all think this new bill is an abomination. All this bill will do is grossly destabilized the entire health care market, without building anything new, or even hewing to typical conservative principles.
Ask yourself this – does the bill actually provide any new alternatives that have not been tried and failed in the past? There are some good conservative ideas that are at least worth exploring. None of them are in this bill, at all.
Say what you will about the Democratic bill that actually passed in 2010, but it was clear during their health care efforts that they actually believed in what they were doing and made a good faith effort to show transparency. People discussed and debated their proposals for months. If you disagreed you had ample time to formulate reasons why and create a reasoned case against it. There is no way you can convince me that Republicans, who despite their claims to fiscal conservatism, didn’t wait for a congressional budget office estimate of what it’s going to cost, and don’t even know what’s in it, feel strongly that this bill is right for the country. Privately several congressional Republicans have groused to reporters that they are a party that does not know how to govern. That’s true. They have no positive vision for America, just undoing anything related to Obama.
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“You have to pass he bill to see what’s in it”
Nancy Pelosi
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@TiaG That’s pretty funny 
“you have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it”. Doesn’t that ring a bell? Any opposition input to the ACA was stifled. Remember Obama telling Ryan “I won”? As much as you say the repubs went about this the wrong way, make that double for the dems with ACA.
I agree this bill sucks. If I had a chance I would have voted against it. I would demand a rational, Conservative, free market based plan and make the government’s role in it much much smaller. I really hope that’s how this ultimately turns out.
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That comment has been grossly perverted. Her comment did not mean that people who were voting on a bill literally had not seen what was passed. IN fact, the bill was public for anyone to read and the basic skeleton was well known for MONTHS!!! The comment, which was made in a speech from March 2010, was not saying people should pass a bill that they had not read. Instead she was saying people would not fully appreciate the effects of the reform till it passed and actually changed the healthcare industry. It was a garbled and dumb way of saying that. But it doesn’t have the nefarious connotations you ascribe to her. Now you can make an argument the you have now seen the effects of the bill and the healthcare market is worse (I’d argue it’s better for many and worse for some), but the argument that the bill and the process was not transparent is just a lie.
Here’s the full text of the speech.
The bill was how many thousands of pages? Nobody read it. The resultant regulations now exceed how many tens of thousands of pages? It was an atrocity. There were some great things in it (which justify about 3 pages worth of the 6,000) but certainly nobody read it. I tried to. I speak fluent governmentese and it was gibberish
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I really find it strange that you are unable to see that one case:
a) people are voting on something they have not read, a bill so bad they don’t want it to apply to them
is just objectively worse than
b) people are voting on a highly partisan bill with no support from the other side, but which has been visible and open for public debate for months.
I had to read it.
Ok. One person read it. How many pages was it? How much of it was comprehensible?
I’m not saying it was Shakespeare but it was vaguely comprehensible to me. It was a monster in its complexity but it really didn’t seem much worse than a lot of other legislation I’ve had to read.
By the way, on that score this bill is also a problem. Because it was so rushed there are so many things in it that are ambiguous or poorly worded, so that means people just don’t understand what the implications are yet. It’s like they published a book that hasn’t gone through a first edit. Just ridiculous.
It’s a backlash over exactly the same thing having been done to them when they were the minority party, it was a horrible idea then, and it’s a horrible idea now
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@TiaG That is really not the whole story. The framework of the bill empowered boards and panels and individuals, none of them elected, to in effect continue writing the bill. They developed tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations that shaped the law ex post facto.
So Pelosi’ s statement was quite prescient. She actually, inadvertently, told the truth.
Good luck with that. There is very little way to make your small government plan a reality because it requires 60 votes. That means the Republicans would have to blow up the filibuster to pass it. And I suspect they really don’t want to do that because they fear they’ll lose their majority with the next elections, in which case they’ve handed the Democrats a loaded gun. Even if they could blow up the filibuster they will require at least 49 votes so that means they can’t afford to lose more moderate Republicans like Susan Collins. Sam’s own senator, Lisa Murkowski, would also be a tough sell on a more conservative package.
Do you imagine that the same will not be true for a Republican passed bill? All the same special interests (who finance both parties pretty equally) will belly up to the trough behind closed doors to get their piece of the pie once whatever horrible Frankenbill is passed. The difference is now that the people without such powerful lobbyists in Washington – poor people, disabled children, and the like, will not have the ear of the rule-writers.