Paul Ryan at CNN’s town hall talked about his Affordable Care Act replacement plan has a lot of repeal, but not much replace. In April, Donald Trump unveiled his healthcare reform agenda — the most detailed component of the plan calling for the “repeal and replace of Obamacare with something much better.”
It’s been more than half a decade since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. Trump and Republicans somehow still don’t have a detailed alternative. All we know is they still want to “repeal and replace” the law — Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has called doing so their “most urgent” objective late last year — and that Republicans have repeatedly held dozens of pointless votes to dismantle it.
The closest Republicans have come to proposing an alternative is Speaker Ryan’s recent June proposal to — yet again — repeal and replace the law. Unveiled as part of Ryan’s #BetterWay policy agenda, the plan was promised as a detailed, if right-wing, substitute for the ACA.
But then Ryan released the proposal, and we learned it:
- had significant deficits where details are concerned — and no cost estimates whatsoever.
- was somehow “less detailed in a variety of crucial ways than previous conservative health reform proposals,” according to the Washington Post’s editorial board.
- would hit seniors and the poor, with the Post writing: “The outlines that the speaker did provide suggest that it would be hard on the poor, old and sick.”
The Post’s Paul Waldman wrote at the time that Ryan’s ACA replacement proposal “would cause absolutely cataclysmic upheaval in Americans’ health care. I cannot stress this strongly enough.” That isn’t high-minded, legitimate policy. It’s the same vacuous “repeal and replace” rhetoric that Donald Trump’s offered over the last year.
Apparently that’s why Speaker Ryan is so “confident that [Trump] will help turn the House GOP’s agenda into laws” — it’s easy to promise another four-to-six years of meaningless repeal votes that are nothing but a waste of taxpayer money.
Published: Jul 12, 2016