Their endgame is to get it back to where it was before the ACA was passed, acknowledge that “oh yes, something must really be done about healthcare”, then do absolutely nothing about it.
They’ll blame them. And the Republican base will believe it. Logic has **nothing whatsoever **to do with it. At all.
They probably just want to go back to the good old days. Healthcare exactly as it was before, plus some tax cuts. The added bonus is that in the new good old days they can say “hey, we tried the crazy lefty ideas and it was worse!”. Game over.
Even Clinton acknowledged that there were some issues that needed to be fixed during the campaign. The marketplace isn’t exactly in the economic death spiral that’s possible if healthier people start to ignore the mandate. It’s less than healthy though. In leaked tapes from a supposedly closed door session of Republicans in Jan, a lot of Republicans weren’t on board with a full repeal and had pieces they seemed to want to keep. The worst fears of the left are positions that are at risk of bleeding too many Republican votes to even pass.
IMO the endgame is to walk the line between the “repeal and replace” talking point and the fact that they can’t get anything too extreme through a Senate filibuster. Package a middle of the road fix package as something “new” that they replaced ACA with and then play chicken with Senate Democrats.* Maybe they get it passed and can use that as an election talking point. If they don’t, and the issues Clinton acknowledged continue to worsen, they can point to partisan obstructionism during Senate races in 2020. It’s a win-win if they can walk a fine enough line near the internal party fault lines.
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- Ryan can afford to start off more extremist with a House bill knowing that the Senate can’t pass a similar bill and the final package could be watered down in conference committee. If the Senate never gets anything through, he can still point to the House action during elections.
Yes, makes sense, more here:
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/.../republican-health-plan-designed-to-fail-ahca
“Is the Republican health plan designed to fail? There’s a theory going around Washington that Republicans don’t want their health bill to pass.”
The endgame is the same as it always is for Republicans: profit. The fattening of the corporate wallets. And if you can fuck over poor people in the process: bonus points!
That theory might help you sleep tonight, but I don’t buy it. This new bill is just too opaque and evil for the theory to be true.
Although it has been lauded because it’s shorter than the ACA, the text is completely opaque, I actually tried reading it. Because it’s styled as budget reconciliation it reads something like…in article 2.543 section 678 of 42USC 1376,1384n replace the text “reimburse in full” with the text “tell them to go screw themselves”. And there’s 60 pages of this crap. So it’s completely non-understandable without the full text of all the various laws being changed and we have to rely on analysis and synopsis.
But this bill is truly evil, it’s Paul Ryan’s wet dream. It basically eliminates all sorts of corporate taxes used to fund healthcare and makes up for the losses by eliminating mental and behavorial health and addiction treatment from Medicaid. Ryan himself described the bill as " so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than welfare reform. We are defederalizing an entitlement(Medicare), block granting it back to the states, and capping its growth."
Ryan wants this bill to fail like he wants his erection to fail. It probably will fail but not because of any self-sabotage by Ryan. So it’s time to stop thinking that the endgame is to get back to where we were before The ACA. It’s way worse than that. The endgame is to strangle Medicaid out of existence and to ultimately privatize Medicare.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever wanted to use the phrase “Wake up Sheeple” without irony.
Now I was never a huge fan of the ACA but it worked better than I expected. It’s was god, far from perfect, but good … like my Honda Civic. And if I had been so desperately ready to hate my Honda that I spent all day crashing it into walls just so I could complain about how badly it ran…well, that’s sort of what was done with the ACA.
Missed edit window
I indicated in the last post that Ryan said he was defederalizing Medicare. That should’ve said Medicaid. Damn autocorrect.
And I meant to say the ACA was good, not god. I get fumble-fingered when I’m riled up. Sorry
The OP is curious about the GOP end game. I don’t think they have one. It’s all about getting re-elected, and that means pandering to ignorance and hate, such as by demonizing and opposing any Democratic initiative. They’ve never before thought about anything more than that, and certainly not what they would do instead. This is what happens when the barking dog finally catches the car.
So, they’re trapped now into having to follow through on enough to keep both their electoral base and their corporate employers happy, and Republicare (Trump has had nothing to do with it so far; don’t put his name on it yet) is the result. Worse, their electoral base wants to both have and repeal health care, so what are they gonna do? Lead? 
No new chapters of Profiles In Courage are being written today; that’s for sure.
So the prevailing theories so far are:
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They have no real plan and are winging it; to quote ElvisL1ves, “This is what happens when the barking dog finally catches the car”.
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The GOP’s goal is to appease the upper class by passing a law that works in their favor.
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The GOP is doing what their voters want by repealing Obamacare.
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The GOP actually does not want their bill to pass, and are only doing this so they can say they tried.
Really, I can see the merit of all of these theories, but I think number 1 encompasses them all in a way. I believe the GOP didn’t expect they would actually get the chance to repeal Obamacare, and now that they have the chance, they want to do all of the above to the point that they have no exact plan of action. Ironic that something like this happens after they try to repeal the plan for 7 years. You would think they would have a credible alternative by then, but I suppose not.
Anyway, I can’t at all see how this ends anyway but badly for them.
I’m going with:
- The Republicans have wanted to shred the federal social safety net for years, and this is a giant leap forward towards the realization of that goal. Don’t get complacent and don’t assume they won’t win.
Because sometimes you might think something is so stupid, evil and just so generally ill-conceived and misinformed that you might think it has no chance of gaining traction and actually winning. But if you let your guard down it might surprise you. Now, while I can’t think of an recent examples…oh, wait, I think there are recent examples.
Apparently now Trump is solidly behind the bill, despite that it pretty much will do the opposite of what he promised.
I read an article this morning (sorry, no cite) where the bill was referred to as “TRyancare.” I like it – it’s advice to some R congresscritters, as in, “The least you can do is Tryancare a little bit about health care for your constituents.”
Speaking of “an endgame” in regards to the GOP and healthcare is to fail to recognize the multiple factions within the GOP.
[ul]
[li]There is a libertarian leaning crowd, such as Rand, that wants to wipe out any government support for healthcare under their ideal that “the market” can and will provide anything that is needed, (despite having already failed to do so).[/li][li]There is the Tea Party faction that also wants to destroy Obamacare without replacement, but based on a nebulous “Let’s hate Obama” rather than a genuine libertarian ideology.[/li][li]There is a group that wants to make radical changes to the ACA, while still leaving some aspects of which the voting public generally approves in place.[/li][li]There is a group that wants to make enough changes to the ACA to align more with older GOP ideals to be able to claim that they fulfilled their campaign promises to abolish Obamacare without actually destroying it so badly that they face an election revolt in 2018 for screwing up the benefits from the ACA. (There is a sadly large contingent of people who oppose “Obamacare” based on dire GOP predictions while happily embracing ACA.)[/li][/ul]
If there was one, single plan that they had to replace the ACA, they would have had the plan written and fleshed out when they were sworn into office at the beginning of January. For too many of them, they had no plan beyond whatever anti- rhetoric they included in their campaign rhetoric. (Which is a bit sad given that they have had six years to actually put such a plan together.) The GOP, always able to present a united front against Obama, now has the unenviable task of getting all their factions together without the Obama boogeyman to unite them.
I thought of this but didn’t mention. You’re right; this little episode with the ACA shows that even though Trump managed to win the election, the divisions that formed in the GOP during the race are still there.
It’s pretty ironic that the GOP has come to rely on Obama as a uniting force. Probably gonna be trouble for them now that he’s gone.
The real Obama is gone, but the imaginary one, the one who tapped Trump’s phone and released all those prisoners from Bush’s torture prison, he’s still destroying America. Only Trump and his faithful sidekick Ivanka Girl can save you now.
I understand riled up fumble fingers… and agree, and love, your Honda/ACA analogy.
The downside to being a party of perpetual opposition is sometimes you may find yourself having to lead.
Not to worry. Trump thinks Obama is running a “shadow government” now. All the Republicans have to do now is to oppose everything that this shadowy secretive force does.
Note this article: Trump Voters Would Be Hit Hardest By Healthcare Replace Plan
Don’t you admire people who are willing to sacrifice several thousand dollars of health insurance subsidies a year in order to have a President who makes speeches about making America great again? [I, for one, would be too much concerned with my economic self-interest to do this.]
I think that if you look at the basic history of what has happened since health care became a significant political issue, the answer will be obvious.
From that beginning, the GOP position was that NOTHING should be done directly, because they were opposed to Federal spending on pretty much anything other than giving freebees to big business (I’m referring to what they call basic government services, such as free Naval protection for shipping, free military promotion of international trade, and free police and other protections within American borders for commerce).
This is confirmed by what they did when the ACA was proposed, and for the entire time it has been in force: opposition, with no alternatives.
They were every bit as surprised as everyone else when Trump won, so they utterly failed (as did Trump’s own support team) to prepare ANY alternative whatsoever.
What they have now cobbled together as fast as they could, is built from the exact same bits and pieces that the ACA was based on, which boiled down to a clumsy attempt to expand the entirely idiotic “insurance” approach to medicine.
The reason for the intense fight to push this mess forward, isn’t based on actual Republican support for it, it’s based on the now nearly five-decade long Republican concept of gaining political support by attacking other Americans, rather than by making any serious attempt to address problems.