Stupid Questions
Senator Ben Nelson asks:
“Who wants to go backward and tell 220,000 Nebraskans they can’t have health insurance? Who wants to deny young adults coverage on their parents’ plan? Who wants to deny children health insurance because they have pre-existing medical conditions?”
Um, that would be the Republicans, sir. 47 Republican senators voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act today. Zero (that’s zero with a 0, or perhaps 0 with a “zero”) Republicans voted against the repeal amendment.
On the subject of stupid, I should point out that this repeal amendment was being attached to a bill authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. Because that’s relevant (and to be fair, the amendment to repeal the widely-derided 1099 tax provision portion of the ACA was also attached to this bill by a Democrat, and was passed).
Knowing as much as I do (which admittedly still isn’t much) about how this works, I would expect to see this repeal amendment added to every bill Mitch McConnell reasonably expects he can get away with.
Notice, however, that while Republicans are SUPER EAGER to take away the protections and advances in availability and care that the ACA provides, they haven’t said a single word about what they actually plan to do once they get rid of it. They have no plan. Which makes their “repeal and replace” strategy sound more like a “repeal and then hope everyone just forgets about it” strategy. The ACA may not be perfect (though it is certainly better than the FUD and bullshittery from the right would imply), but it’s still a far sight better than what we had before, so let’s keep moving forward and stop trying to go backwards, shall we?
(I debated writing that as “repeal and replace” “strategy”, but I felt that the sarcasm quotes around strategy were ultimately unnecessary, damaged the flow of the sentence, and defeated the efficacy of the actual quotation marks around repeal and replace. We need more punctuation… maybe we could make little superscripted ‘S’es for sarcasm quotes! sstrategys!)