EDITORIAL: Gutting health care for 24 million Americans is no cause for celebration

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)

May 06--President Donald Trump and House Republican leaders gathered in the White House Rose Garden at mid-afternoon Thursday to celebrate House passage of the American Health Care Act a couple of hours earlier. The scene was bewildering.

Here were people who had just voted to destroy health care coverage for up to 14 million Americans next year -- and as many as 24 million in 10 years. It would do so by generating a $600 billion tax cut for wealthy Americans.

Here were people who had just voted to give states the right to let insurance companies off the hook for providing comprehensive health insurance, or for covering pre-existing conditions at affordable prices, or for not price-gouging older patients. Here were people who had voted for cuts in Medicaid programs that pay health care costs for 8.4 million children and for 60 percent of nursing home residents.

This was a bill that most major medical organizations opposed. It would close hospitals in rural areas. It would cast into uncertainty the one-sixth of the American economy devoted to health care.

And yet in the Rose Garden, they were laughing it up. "We want to brag about this plan," Trump said. What was there to brag about? And what about the other house of Congress that still must weigh in before anyone can claim victory?

Yes, getting to this point had been a long, hard slog. Since recapturing the House in 2010 by running against President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, Republicans had voted at least 62 times to replace all or part of Obamacare. On Thursday, they finally succeeded.

But a funny thing has happened since 2010: Obamacare became popular. In April, Gallup found 55 percent of Americans supporting the ACA, with 41 percent opposed. Despite its problems, it is working. Rather than fix its basic problem by injecting more competition into the insurance markets, Republicans made things much worse.

How much worse is not yet known because House leaders forced their final version to a vote before the Congressional Budget Office had a chance to score its effects. The CBO estimate in March for a previous version of the bill led to a vote being postponed while the bill was revised. The score this time probably won't improve.

GOP House members can brag all they want, but the bill is not going anywhere. Senate leaders said they will wait for a CBO score and may well rewrite it in a way that could get 51 votes. Given the politics of health care, that will be difficult.

The House bill, then, was in effect a political suicide pact over a bill going nowhere. In 2018, Democrats will use the vote to demonstrate their GOP colleagues' failure. The photos from the Rose Garden should be helpful.

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