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Without reconciliation, all we're doing is tinkering at the edges of ObamaCare. It's not going to be repealed

GOP House leadership affirms Ryan's statement: We're still going to repeal and replace ObamaCare



Can I take credit for this? (Can you stop me if I decide to?) Can I theorize that they read my Monday morning missives calling them quitters and declaring the Democrats their vast superiors when it comes to achieving policy goals, and they decided, "What the hell is wrong with us? We can't let this Calabrese guy say that about us!" Of course, I was far from the only person to say such things. And whether you agree with me that the House Freedom Caucus foolishly botched the first attempt, or agree with Rob that the leadership failed by offering an awful bill after having seven years to work on it, the fact of the matter is that there's no excuse whatsoever for giving up and throwing in the towel after barely two months of working on it.
And as Paul Ryan said yesterday, and the rest of his leadership team has now affirmed, ObamaCare is still doomed:
House of Representatives Republican leaders said on Tuesday they still intended to repeal and replace Obamacare after their White House-backed bill failed to get enough support and collapsed last week. "The fact that our conference is more resolved than ever to repeal this law is very encouraging and we're not going to stop until we get it done," said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy after a closed meeting. House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters he would not give a timeline on any new attempt to pass healthcare legislation "because we want to get it right."
In other words, they've decided Sen. Tom Cotton was right all along in saying that it's more important to do this right than to do it fast. I don't really understand why they ever thought otherwise, but they sure did.

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Some of it, I think, was the sort of Beltwayesque way of looking at how you approach an agenda, and the idea that you go fast out of the gate with a major achievement that gives you "momentum," whatever that means. At one point in the days leading up to Trump's inauguration, there was actually talk that ObamaCare might be repealed within a week. That was always a fantasy, but after seven years of waiting for it and finally having (we thought) the majorities in place, a lot of people just wanted action, as quickly as possible. When a new president takes office there's this idiotic "first 100 days" storyline pushed by the media, and everyone wants to show how productive that first 100 days are. To me that's always been silly. You've got four years to govern - and a given Congress has two years - so there's no reason you have to do things within 100 days, or 200 days, or 439 days. It's an arbitrary number by which the media will judge you successful or unsuccessful out of the gate. It means nothing. That's especially true when you're dealing with a piece of legislation as complex as health care reform. You don't do that in a week, or obviously even in a couple of months. And I want to say a word here about the oft-repeated criticism that they "had seven years" to figure this out, and thus should have had their plan ready to go as soon as they all took office. That ignores some very important things. First, "they" have not all been in Congress for the past seven years, and not everyone has been in the same role. We have a different House Speaker and several different committee chairs - not to mention lots of new members. If John Boehner has drawn up a repeal-and-replace plan in 2011, would you have wanted that same bill passed today? Didn't think so.

Also, health insurance markets are different today because of the effects of ObamaCare. A plan drawn up seven years ago would have wrongly predicted everything from enrollment sizes to premium levels to the structure of the exchanges and the participation of insurers. Much of what happened was predictable, but until it actually happens and you can assess it, you can't really draw up legislation to deal with it. ObamaCare was passed seven years ago, but the present situation is not the same as the 2016 status quo, or 2015, or 2014 . . . You have to design legislation to deal with the reality of today, and anything designed even a year or two ago would have had to be adjusted to reflect that. So that's a very silly criticism, and yet I hear it all the time - mostly from conservatives who I think are just cranky and impatient to finally get this taken care of. Anyway, it looks like the House is fully back on board with doing that. But uh oh . . . If that's what John Cornyn is saying, does that mean Mitch McConnell is thinking the same thing? Plain and simple, there will be no repeal of ObamaCare by anything other than reconciliation, because not a single Democrat is going to vote for it, so you'll never get to 60 votes. A "bipartisan" health reform bill might be able to repair some of ObamaCare's worst bugs, but it's not going to get rid of it. Now, maybe (I hope) Cornyn said this before it was clear that House Republicans were ready to gear up and take another shot at it - thus blunting any thought on Trump's part that he would have to go to Schumer and Pelosi and strike some kind of a deal. If the House GOP can get its act together and pass something solid, maybe the Senate GOP can also produce something that has a chance to go into conference committee and come out with a shot at passage. But let there be no mistake: Without reconciliation, all we're doing is tinkering at the edges of ObamaCare. It's not going to be repealed. If John Cornyn means what he says, then someone needs to sit him down and sent him straight quickly. We don't need to be losing Senate Republicans just as their House counterparts finally get their own heads on straight.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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