I suppose politicians are predisposed to think more highly of their own opinions and agendas than anyone else’s.
How else does one explain Senate Republicans’ stubborn insistence that their version of an overhaul of the nation’s health care insurance system is good while actual experts say it’s bad?
The Congressional Budget Office, the famously non-partisan agency charged with “scoring” legislation, has said the GOP plan would cost 22 million Americans their health insurance over the next decade.
Now we hear from some Nobel Prize laureates, economists with a proven track record of expertise and knowledge about such matters, saying the GOP bill is bad news for Americans.
Not to be derailed or dissuaded, the Senate Republican leadership is going to trudge ahead with a vote — possibly as early as Thursday — on this so-called alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
I’ll call it Trumpcare, named after the president of the United States. I have refused to refer to the ACA by its more colloquial term named after former President Barack Obama; that’s just me, though, and my bias speaking out loud.
Trumpcare is a turkey, according to the Nobel laureates.
Here’s how The Hill reports on it.
According to The Hill: “We call on Congress to work on legislation to improve the health delivery system, in general, and The Affordable Care Act, in particular,” the economists wrote. “The goal should be to hold down health costs and increase access to affordable, quality health coverage for all.”
The plan under consideration doesn’t do any of that. It also makes dramatic cuts in Medicaid insurance, upon which millions of Americans depend because they cannot afford to pay the full freight for health insurance.
The Senate plan has made conservatives angry because it doesn’t go far enough in repealing the ACA. It makes GOP moderates angry because it is every bit as “mean” — to borrow a term used by the president — as the plan that House members approved by a narrow 217-213 vote.
Nobel laureate economists dislike it, too, as do apparently millions of just plain average Americans who are worried about what it will do to their insurance plans.
The only folks who like it are the 13 Republican U.S. senators who cobbled this legislation together.
Are these men the only people in America who have it right, that everyone else is wrong? I think not.