Opinion

Trump’s failure to unite GOP led to epic health care reform disaster

Why can’t Republicans in Congress pass health care reform? This is the question to ask after the Republican Senate leadership’s plan was stabbed to death by conservative Senate Republicans.

The answer is shockingly simple: Republican voters do not actually want health care reform — and these elected officials are just doing the bidding of their constituents.

Those voters could have been led to support the Republican efforts on Capitol Hill by a new president who carefully and conscientiously laid out the fatal problems of ObamaCare and how a new plan would fix what was broken and even create a new path to America’s long-term fiscal health.

Republican policy wonks have been designing plans to do just that from the moment ObamaCare became law in 2010. Both the House bill that passed in June and the Senate bill that just died are chock-full of sensible policy fixes.





But wonky policy has to be sold. People have to be told why what happens next will be better than what is happening now. When the Congressional Budget Office offers an analysis of the bill that makes it look bad, someone has to stand up and explain why the CBO is wrong and what it’s missing.

Most important, leaders have to explain to their constituents why certain types of hard choices were made so that the constituents who want to support the bill because it’s the bill that was devised by their team can make the right arguments for it.

But we don’t live on an alternate Earth, one in which almost any other 2016 Republican candidate for president was elected. We live on this Earth, and on Monday, the day that the health care bill died, the new president was literally playing around in a firetruck on the White House lawn.





President Trump’s power with Republican voters is such that they are even giving him the benefit of the doubt on most of the Russia revelations. Imagine if he had worked to rally them behind the ObamaCare repeal-and-replace efforts on the Hill.

He didn’t. There was no one with a powerful enough national profile doing any such thing, either when the House was struggling with the legislation or in the past few weeks with the Senate tied up in knots.

Is it any wonder a controversial piece of legislation with no champions would poll around 20 percent?

Is it any wonder that a bill with 20 percent support would not, in the end, be signed into law?





Politicians, like all other employed people, generally do not commit career suicide. If no one defends or argues for something this complicated, why on Earth would anyone support it?

Trump has acted more like a loudmouth kibitzer than the leader of a country and the leader of a party — or the leader of anything.

In early January, he declared ObamaCare needed to be replaced at the same time it was repealed. That statement entirely upended the Republican approach on Capitol Hill, which would have been to work to pass a repeal on a two-year timetable.

Then, just after the bill was pronounced dead on Monday night, Trump declared he’d always been for repealing ObamaCare first and then taking up its replacement.

Last week he said he’d be angry with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell if he didn’t get the bill through, as though McConnell were the manager of the Yankees losing the World Series 3 games to none and he were just Don From Fifth Avenue calling in to yell about the pitching choices on WFAN.





To be sure, Trump joins with almost all Republicans, voters and officials alike, in wanting ObamaCare dead. But that is not because they agree on what is wrong with it and how to fix it. And now they have failed in the most spectacular fashion when it comes to achieving the goal that has been the greatest Republican preoccupation since March 2010.

I hope Trump learned something in his time riding on the firetruck on the South Lawn, because the GOP just set itself ablaze.





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