Remember the Teutonic admonition regarding politics and sausage? Well, it was on full display today as the GOP cranked out a reform bill tackling health care. It didn’t have to be this way, but the conservative faction acknowledged that if it didn’t deliver, it would relinquish all authority regarding future legislation. By any measure, the GOP Freedom Caucus stepped back from the brink and swallowed hard. Let’s remember exactly how we got here: the entire Democratic bench obstructed while liberal Republicans straddled every available crevice to prevent the cataclysmic closure of future and immediate governing. If you really want to know how to read today’s vote, its this: their aren’t enough conservatives around to pull legislation center-right in our culture war.
Most importantly, because we’re no longer a Constitutional Republic, we’re going to careen continuously until a convention of the States begins. Until then, the GOP either huddles together or it fractures and fails miserably.
The April 04, 2017 Kaufman Foundation poll revealed that the Republic would openly seek to destroy the GOP even with a duplicitous media and obstructionist opposition. This is the battlefield conservatives are on, don’t forget it.
For those who followed the entrails of health care reform, you know about the collapsing health care insurance markets, the failed subsidies, the death spiral of dysfunctional capital markets and institutional closures due to dwindling participation. The whole damned edifice is rotting fast, so conservatives should not expect to be able to deliver what’s needed but what’s required for them to survive as a governing party. The cynicism is nearly bottomless with states across the nation absconding, doctors openly leaving practice and federal agency ‘navigators‘ responsible for administering this albatross lost at foggy bottom naval gazing.
If this leaves you a bit sick, expect more to come, because what team Obama delivered on January 2017 is a deadly weakened Union.
Before anyone thinks of championing this procrustean bed, we need to consider the following immediately: malpractice reform, tort reform, elimination of the tierd rating systems to attract millennials, permit the selling of insurance across state boundaries (ending rent-seeking), the reduction of pre-existing conditions and finally the legal capacity for states with noncompetitive insurance markets the ability to extend employer contracts.
If that’s not enough, upon returning from vacation, our representatives need to fix our non-competitive capital markets.
By any measure. . . we’re failing.
William Holland
William Holland 