Where are political moderates when health care needs them?
Most people, when treading water, would be less than thrilled to be handed a concrete life preserver.
Yet President Donald Trump sounded as tickled as a schoolboy with the hastily drawn American Health Care Act that House Republicans passed to repeal and replace President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
"How am I doing? Am I doing OK?" he said in a Rose Garden celebration with House Republicans. "I'm president. Hey, I'm president. Can you believe it?"
Not yet. I still have a hard time believing it. I still wake up in the morning with a disbelieving, "President who?"
So I found it oddly reassuring that, after more than 100 days in office, he sounded as though he finds his election as hard to believe as I still do. Maybe he is not as politically clueless as he sometimes sounds.
Still, the Trump-backed AHCA is a political turkey badly out of step with the times and public sentiments. The Obamacare that it is supposed to replace actually has gained in popularity as more people begin to learn what they'll lose without it. For the first time in the Gallup Poll, 55 percent of Americans approved of the ACA, its highest numbers yet.
Yet House Republicans passed a bill that does far more to repeal than to replace. It's not as much of a health care bill as a tax bill, critics have pointed out, using hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, for example, to offset hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy.
House Speaker Paul Ryan rushed the bill through the House before the Congressional Budget Office would tell lawmakers what it would cost. But the CBO famously estimated that an earlier draft would lead to 24 million people losing their coverage over the next decade.
Threats like that turn up pressure on Republican lawmakers who face challenges in swing districts. Following Napoleon's dictum, the Dems don't want to interrupt opponents who are busily destroying themselves.
Indeed, some Dems couldn't restrain themselves from trolling Republicans on the House floor by singing the old Steam hit "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" to their Grand Old Party colleagues after the vote. "They have this vote tattooed on them," declared House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi after the bill passed the House. "This is a scar they carry."
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