By Robert P. Bomboy
JULY 23, 2017
Lies.
Lies. Lies.
I've always
enjoyed the movies of the actor Sean Connery, not only the James Bond
thrillers, but many others. There's a line in one of them, The Hunt
for Red October, that leaves me nodding my head. A White House official
admits: "I'm a politician, when I'm not kissing babies, I'm
stealing their lollipops."
Trying to
force his fellow senators to bend to his will and pass the Unaffordable Care
Act, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, tried every trick in
the book, twisting and turning, strongarming and threatening the 51 Republicans
under his sway.
And withal,
he lied, and lied, and lied.
He and his
Republican allies - including Donald Trump, as candidate and president - had
spent years stirring their witches' cauldron of falsehoods about Obamacare.
They said it was written behind closed
doors, even though it wasn't. It was McConnell and his henchmen who locked
themselves in a closet, wrote their Frankenstein Act in stygian darkness,
rejected any public or expert participation, refused to let Senate Democrats
see it, and then were astounded when even their own Republican senators
wouldn't stand for it.
McConnell said Obamacare was a
Big-Government takeover, when it was actually a combination of conservative and
liberal ideas.
He and Trump said Obamacare was
"collapsing, imploding, exploding," when in fact it has mostly worked
well and has been successful.
Now Trump says he's "bored"
with healthcare, and O'Connell met a dead end when he said he wanted to repeal
Obamacare completely and not replace it with anything - which would leave 32
million of us (one in ten of all us Americans) without any form of health
insurance.
Senator
McConnell, you've had your fling. As a Kentucky Colonel you've been bullheaded,
and racist, about Obamacare. Now it's time to be a statesman, to look at
Obamacare with the eyes of a statesman, as a legislator whose true role is to
work with other legislators - Republicans and Democrats - to safeguard the
welfare of all Americans.
It's time
now to hold dispassionate hearings with the true aim of improving Obamacare.
Its problems are eminently fixable. If you hadn't been so hard-nosed, you would
have seen a possible answer staring you in the face in the form of the 2003
Medicare Modernization Act, which was passed by a Republican Congress and
signed into law by a Republican president, George W. Bush.
That
Medicare law went after the same issue that is besetting the so-called Obamacare
"marketplaces" - where people without insurance can be able to buy
coverage from private insurers.
In 2002 the government wasn't paying
insurers enough to keep them selling new Medicare Advantage coverage in the
marketplace: the number of Medicare Advantage plans dropped by 50 percent, and
the number of enrollees fell too. When the Medicare Advantage Act raised
payments to insurers, new companies and new coverage came into the marketplace.
Bringing
Republicans and Democrats together, with bipartisanship, to look at the example
of the Medicare Modernization Act may be a place to start over again.
Certainly
the Senate showed you the road to perdition this week: With four senators
saying they opposed the bill (more than enough to kill it) and 10 others
voicing deep concerns about it, you couldn't call an outright vote.
The Republican heroes I mentioned
in previous columns did stand up: Senators Shelley Capito, Dr. Bill Cassidy,
Susan Collins, Dean Heller, Lisa Murkoski, and Ron Portman. Public concern,
Twitter, emails, letters, and phone calls helped to give them strength.
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