Be glad President Donald Trump is not a brain surgeon. Even though Donald is said not to drink, he is flighty. Given the complexity of health care and the difficulty in creating a new plan, Trump's current performance seems inconsistent and impulsive. He is now said to have proposed, in a closed-door meeting, hurrying the end of a planned expansion of Medicaid. This is said to be Trump the deal maker at work. CNN calls it a tumult and says there is more to come.
The likely truth is that the President is facing a divided GOP. Half want a mix of Obamacare and conservative options.
The other half want total repeal and replacement which is not actually on the table.
Paving the way to defeat?
CNN notes that 20 Senators hail from states where Medicaid expansion, a popular feature of Obamacare, is due to be phased out in 2020. Trump wants to appeal to heartless GOP House Obamacare-haters by advancing the execution date. If you are making odds on Senate passage, do you think Trump has just assured that the bill could suffer an ignominious defeat if it ever gets there?
In fairness
To be fair to the Trump effort, politics works both ways. If you want to look at things from a distance, as the song says, we can see that it was wrong not to seek a middle ground back in 2005. Perhaps Barack Obama could have walked into McConnell's office and said, "Look, I know you and your friends met the night I was inaugurated and decided that nothing I did would meet with your approval, but we are a country of good politics and good politics shares the good and the bad." Would such an approach have been possible?
Equating politics with the trivial did not serve President Obama well.
Trump adds to chaos of health care deliberations https://t.co/D4cxV5T9qw
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) March 13, 2017
Weak or strong tea?
The Tea Party folk in the House want to set 2017 as the time when the sun will set on Medicaid expansion. The prospects in the House are for a possible defeat of the measure depending on how serious these extreme conservatives are. The Senate prospects for passage are definitely minimized if the sunset is moved up. We would not want to jeopardize anyone's reelection or have anyone say that Trump tinkers while healthcare burns.
