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" Will Donald Trump really go through with all of it?
It’s worth stepping back and looking at the big picture for a moment. While we are arguing over 1,000 jobs saved at Carrier and obsessing over a verbal scuffle between Trump and Hillary Clinton aides over what really happened in the campaign, Trump and Republicans may soon be going forward with an agenda that could inflict radical, disruptive change on millions of people.
Consider just a portion of what lies ahead:
1) Millions are set to lose health insurance. CNN reports this morning that Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that would repeal Obamacare at the outset but delay the full impact of it, on the gamble that Democrats will help them replace it later. Whether or not that will actually happen, the move underscores that Republicans themselves are discovering how hard it will be to replace Obamacare with something that accomplishes roughly the same things — or at least enough of them to keep their proposal from looking too radical — without all the things they hate about it. Yet they are likely to go through with repeal anyway.
Trump vowed to repeal Obamacare and won the election, so it’s hardly surprising that this is happening. Yet there are zero indications that Trump himself understands the fundamental dilemma here, which is that Republicans are mostly in policy fantasy-land on this issue. There is no obvious way to repeal all the things Republicans hate about Obamacare while replacing it with the “terrific” things Trump has said he wants (protections for people with preexisting conditions, health care for everybody). Everything he has said indicates he thinks this will be easy.
It’s possible Republicans will get cold feet, obviously, particularly since a number of GOP legislators now come from states that have expanded Medicaid, meaning they’ll now have to vote to actually kick untold numbers off health coverage. But it’s also possible that repeal will go forward, and then a replacement will miraculously fail to materialize. "
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/12/02/dont-get-distracted-trump-and-republicans-are-set-to-inflict-radical-disruptive-change/?utm_term=.9c95b5e8d24c
It’s worth stepping back and looking at the big picture for a moment. While we are arguing over 1,000 jobs saved at Carrier and obsessing over a verbal scuffle between Trump and Hillary Clinton aides over what really happened in the campaign, Trump and Republicans may soon be going forward with an agenda that could inflict radical, disruptive change on millions of people.
Consider just a portion of what lies ahead:
1) Millions are set to lose health insurance. CNN reports this morning that Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that would repeal Obamacare at the outset but delay the full impact of it, on the gamble that Democrats will help them replace it later. Whether or not that will actually happen, the move underscores that Republicans themselves are discovering how hard it will be to replace Obamacare with something that accomplishes roughly the same things — or at least enough of them to keep their proposal from looking too radical — without all the things they hate about it. Yet they are likely to go through with repeal anyway.
Trump vowed to repeal Obamacare and won the election, so it’s hardly surprising that this is happening. Yet there are zero indications that Trump himself understands the fundamental dilemma here, which is that Republicans are mostly in policy fantasy-land on this issue. There is no obvious way to repeal all the things Republicans hate about Obamacare while replacing it with the “terrific” things Trump has said he wants (protections for people with preexisting conditions, health care for everybody). Everything he has said indicates he thinks this will be easy.
It’s possible Republicans will get cold feet, obviously, particularly since a number of GOP legislators now come from states that have expanded Medicaid, meaning they’ll now have to vote to actually kick untold numbers off health coverage. But it’s also possible that repeal will go forward, and then a replacement will miraculously fail to materialize. "
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/12/02/dont-get-distracted-trump-and-republicans-are-set-to-inflict-radical-disruptive-change/?utm_term=.9c95b5e8d24c