We Must Apologize to the Democratic Party

We owe the Democratic Party an apology. You may not like that I’m saying it, but we do. We owe them a big one, because we have called them liars for years and it turns out they were right about something.

Ever since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party has campaigned on and even championed the cause of repealing it. “You need to give us the House of Representatives,” they told us, “and we will fix this mess.” And so, in 2010, we gave them the House.

And they said they’d do it, and they tried, and then they told us “You need to give us the Senate, too, then we can really fix it.” So, we did give them the Senate in 2014.

And they passed repeal after repeal, which was promptly vetoed with no possibility of override. “You need to give us the White House,” they said. “That’ll make it a reality.” And, in 2016, the United States gave Donald Trump the White House, and kept the Republicans in power in Congress.

The whole time leading up to this point, however, the Democrats mocked and derided the Republicans. “You have no plan to replace it,” they cried. And, we ignored them, because we had ideas and we had people pushing those ideas.

So, months after Donald Trump takes office, the Republican leadership in the House presents a bill to the American public, and the response was nothing short disastrous. You see, the Democrats were right all along. We, very clearly, had no plan.

That is the only way to explain presenting a bill that keeps most of the regulatory structure of Obamacare in place while removing the individual mandate and creating a new entitlement in “tax credits” and calling it “conservative health care reform.” We very clearly had no plan.

What happened? We had people in Congress who presented bills that called for the very things we wanted. We had entire books written by conservatives on what we needed. We have the ideas, but we have no plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.

I get the situation the GOP was in. They’re in power now. They have a failing health care system that has to be taken care of, and if they just leave it to rot, then all the people hurt will blame them. But, if they try to make any changes and a person so much as sneezes, then they will take the blame for all the health-related woes of the American people.

So, they took the higher road and tried to fix it. But, they had no plan. Just some ideas they rubbed a glue stick on and pasted onto a bill.

That’s not how you are going to fix this, and it’s insane to try. What we have presented before us will not work, and it needs to be heavily amended (something Republican leadership is slowly coming to admit) if it has any chance. But, you cannot simply “amend” the Affordable Care Act. You ran on repeal and replace, and you should repeal and replace.

But, the Democrats were right all along. Republicans ultimately didn’t have a plan. And it shows. The question now is how the Republicans recover from this botched bill.

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