I read every word you wrote. And for what it’s worth, it was a good post and reply.
I appreciate your sense of idealism, right and wrong, and disdain for sports analogies, but you have either missed or intentionally overlooked providing a solution to the problem. A solution that can actually become law.
Obamacare is law, went to the Supreme Court. You and I share the view it is unconstitutional, but unfortunately John Roberts disagreed and that ship sailed. He’s the one with the black robe.
Doing nothing is not an option. A President cannot run around saying an explosion is going to happen and just wait for it to occur. This is not leadership When you are the majority party, you own the problems, even ones not of your creation.
I’m all ears if you have a grand plan to move this thing back where it should be within a year. I don’t see that path. I don’t like where we are with it. But we got our tails handed to us by Obama on this topic, and digging our way out is much easier said than done.
I was going to finish with a Touchdown! reference but decided not to do so as it would be overplaying my hand. /s
Contrary to what a number of #TrumpIsAlwaysRighters on this and various other threads have written, conservatism is not a philosophy of idealism, and I am not an idealist. When I was an idealist, I was a far left union organizer. That life has now burned away 40+ years ago.
Conservatives don't believe things on pure principle. We believe in our principles because they are the principles which will produce the best outcomes. That is why I have no conversations with people who tell me that "purist" conservatism is an error: "Purist" conservatism, like "compassionate" conservatism is a mischaracterization of what conservatism is.
There is no such thing as "compassionate" conservatism because conservatism is, by its very nature, the most compassionate choice. The man who coined that phrase had some (few) conservative instincts, but he was not a conservative. He had, in fact, no ideology that anyone has ever identified, and that is one of the reasons that he (largely) failed.
Similarly, there is no such thing as "purist" conservatism. There is conservatism, and there are things which are not conservative, and when the two of them are mixed together the result is always less than what a conservative solution would provide.
That is why I also deprecate those who say "Trump is a pragmatist." Pragmatism is simply another name for randomly attempting things which have no basis in reality but we "think will work." Why? On the basis of no principle whatsoever, but they seem expedient. Sorry. That is no way to run a country.
Here's my answer: what did we have before 0bamacare?
Nothing.
That is what we should revert to.
Nothing.
If, as a palliative to public opinion, we want to allow individuals with dangerous conditions who won't otherwise be insured by private businesses to get healthcare, we can do what states already do in their mandatory insurance programs: provide publicly funded risk pools for high risk individuals.
We should not, in any case whatsoever be "insuring" people with "preexisting" conditions. That is not insurance; that is simply welfare. Insurance is a means by which people protect each other cooperatively by assuming risk together. If you allow individuals who have decided not to mitigate their risk by going without insurance come into the system after they're injured or sick, you are not talking about anything that remotely resembles insurance. You are talking about selfish people who want to keep their money as long as they can, and then spend everyone else's when the time to pay the piper comes.
We can't be afraid to say that.
And we can't be afraid to say: there IS NO PUBLIC entitlement to Healthcare. We fought that fight for sixty years, and it is not time to give up on it after 6 years of a far left administration. And that is my objection to this bill. Ryan conceded, by providing a "lite" alternative to 0bamacare that the government belongs in this sphere. It doesn't. It is not part of governance.
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Finally, one small point that is nevertheless important: John Roberts did NOT rule that 0bamacare was Constitutional. If you read his decision for the majority he clearly says at the outset: "The PPACA is both Constitutional AND Unconsitutional." All that the majority upheld in that decision was the individual mandate as part of Congress's plenary power to tax. A number of other provisions were, in fact, struck down, the most important being a Federal power grab to coerce the states into joining expanded Medicaid. {Parenthesis within parenthesis: striking that provision down alone, in the absence of a severability clause made the entire PPACA a legal nullity.}
That point is important in this context because a number of states with the biggest problems with a repeal belong PRECISELY to those Democrat governors (and John Kasich) who OVERCOMMITTED their states to the PPACA by expanding Medicaid voluntarily when they did not need to do so. They deliberately made this choice so that 0bamacare would be more painful to repeal. Tell me: why should a Republican Congress care about protecting them now?
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