Trump whines about filibuster rule after Obamacare repeal goes down in flames

President Donald Trump complained about Senate rules after the Obamacare repeal failed to pass hours earlier.

The measure failed 49-51 after three Republican senators — Susan Collins, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski — broke with their party, and Trump called for an end to the filibuster rule to pass it later.

“If Republicans are going to pass great future legislation in the Senate, they must immediately go to a 51 vote majority, not senseless 60,” Trump tweeted shortly before 10 a.m.

“Even though parts of healthcare could pass at 51, some really good things need 60. So many great future bills & budgets need 60 votes,” he added a few minutes later.

Original Article
Source: rawstory.com
Author: Travis Gettys

Why Mitch McConnell and the Republicans Can’t Fix Health Care

Mitch McConnell’s decision to postpone a vote on his health-care-reform bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, is a political setback (and perhaps only a temporary one) for the Republican Party. But, beyond this week’s drama, the bill and its troubles reflect conservatism’s failure when it comes to thinking about health care.

Even if McConnell somehow manages to revive the bill in the coming weeks and put together the fifty votes that he needs to get it through the Senate, that broader failure will remain a problem for him and his party. If they end up passing this bill or something like it, they will be betting their future on a reform that cannot deliver what Donald Trump promised during the election campaign and what Paul Ryan and his colleagues promised last December: reasonably priced access to health care for every American. Over time, political pressure would mount for the restoration of Obamacare, or even for a public option available to everyone.

I’ve covered Obamacare since day one. I’ve never seen lying and obstruction like this

Republicans do not want the country to know what is in their health care bill.

This has become more evident each day, as the Senate plots out a secretive path toward Obamacare repeal — and top White House officials (including the president) consistently lie about what the House bill actually does.

There was even a brief moment Tuesday where Senate Republicans flirted with the idea of banning on-camera interviews in congressional hallways, a plan quickly reversed after outcry from the press.

House Obamacare repeal DOA in the Senate

Forget the House GOP's troubles passing a health care bill. The party's bigger problem looms in the Senate.

Mitch McConnell is being tasked with fixing what GOP senators and House members say is a flawed Obamacare repeal proposal — one with little to no chance of passing in that chamber in its current form — in a week’s time.

Republicans Are Legislating Like There’s No Tomorrow

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested Sunday that the push by his fellow Republicans to pass a healthcare reform bill was putting the GOP’s House majority at risk. Don’t “walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate,” he warned. That warning became more urgent Monday after an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office showed that 24 million people would lose their healthcare insurance over the next decade under the GOP plan. The effects would hit older, low-income people especially hard. A 64-year-old making $26,500, for example, would pay $14,600 in premiums for insurance, versus $1,700 under Obamacare. Vox called it “one of the largest, most significant income redistribution programs the US government has ever considered—from the poor to the wealthy rather than the other way around.”

Twenty-Four Million Reasons the G.O.P. Health-Care Bill Is No Good

For days, the political world had been waiting nervously for the Congressional Budget Office's assessment of the House Republicans' Trump-endorsed proposal to replace Obamacare. On Monday afternoon, when the numbers-heavy report finally appeared, one figure it contained dominated all the others: twenty-four million.

This was the C.B.O.'s estimate of how many fewer people would have health insurance if the Republican legislation—which is called the American Health Care Act—passes. In 2018, the first year that many of the bill’s changes would go into effect, fourteen million "more people would be uninsured under the legislation than under current law," the report said. The difference "would rise to 21 million in 2020 and then to 24 million in 2026."