Another Trumpcare plan: Just don't get sick
President Barack Obama's ACA is itself based on a plan created in the conservative Heritage Foundation and enacted by Republican Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts.
By carving out a middle ground between the status quo and the single-payer option that Sen. Bernie Sanders -- among many others -- calls "Medicare for all," Obama thought he would be able to build a new consensus based on mutual compromise.
Oh, yeah. Compromise. I'm old enough to remember when congressional lawmakers did that a lot. Today we have a Congress run by Republicans who have too hard of a time achieving compromise in their own ranks to even try to negotiate with Democrats.
That's too bad because both parties knew the ACA, like any large and complex legislation, was far from perfect. Obama had hoped improvements could be legislated after passage, as they were after the creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
But those programs were created by Democratic presidents with Democratic majorities in Congress. Today we have a Republican Congress that has been way too focused on repealing Obamacare to worry much about how to replace it.
GOP leaders also seem tone deaf and clueless to big shifts in public attitudes that increasingly favor government health care, now that it appears to be in serious jeopardy of repeal. A January poll by Pew Research Center, for example, found 60 percent of Americans say the government should responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, compared with 38 percent who say it shouldn't.
Yet Democrats seem remarkably lax about getting ahead of the public's shifting mood. Perhaps they have been too consumed with waiting and watching to see where probes of President Trump's Russian connection will lead.
Meanwhile, anxious and angry swing voters are looking for ACA improvements more than repeal. They don't need two out-of-touch parties. One is more than enough.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
