Republicans keep trying with failed healthcare bill

Senate Republicans announce another vote on their healthcare reform bill this week and have even delayed the scheduled August recess to continue working on it. Despite their persistence, they still do not have full support from within their own party.

The Republican crusade to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, continues. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced a planned vote on a revised healthcare bill this Thursday.

While he and other Republicans continue to blame the Democrats for their obstructionism, apparently having forgotten the past eight years, they need look no further than their own party for opposition to this terrible bill. The first planned vote was cancelled in June due to lack of support, but it does not seem they are in a much better position than last time. If just three senators from their own party vote no, as will presumably the whole Democratic Party, the bill won’t pass.

At the moment way more than three senators oppose this bill. Important voices such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are against it, as are five others. Even the opposition is divided about what they want changed, with some saying the bill is too conservative, and others saying it is not conservative enough.

As entertaining as watching the Republicans tear themselves apart is, after a certain point even they have to realize its a lost cause. The bill they are proposing will not fix healthcare, but make things worse for the average American citizen.

Obamacare was certainly not perfect, but the changes they propose will cause much greater harm. The Senate bill would end the Medicaid expansion as well as drastically cut funding for the program. Republicans love to point out that the bill will mean lower insurance premiums. The part they leave out is the logical conclusion to lower premiums, which is lower coverage. That means more out of pocket expenses toward healthcare for the average American.

It seems the Republicans have forgotten how to be a governing party. After eight years of being the opposition, they don’t know how to bring their own party together. For the sake of the country’s healthcare system, let’s hope it stays that way. The Affordable Care Act was a small step forward, let’s not now take five steps back. The next step has to be single payer, universal healthcare.

But as usual the Republicans want to run the government as a corporation, and not as a body that is by the people and for the people. A government by the people and for the people would not seek to throw millions off their health insurance, it would seek to insure millions more. For some reason Republicans in Congress seem blind to the concern of the millions of Americans who would be hurt by this bill. Even doctors and hospitals around the country, presumably the authorities on this subject, have come out against this bill, saying it would create major problems within the health care industry.

It seems the only thing the Republicans care about is repealing Obamacare just for the sake of doing so, with no concern about what that actually might do to the country. It’s their personal vendetta against the former president they clearly despise so much they want to eliminate his signature piece of legislation, even if doing so causes harm.

But we cannot go backwards, so that health care becomes a gamble where you have to hope and pray not to get sick, because if you do, you have no way to pay to heal yourself. Frankly the idea that the healthcare you get should be in any way tied to your income is barbaric in the richest country in the world in the 21st century. If the Republicans want to fix healthcare, they should look at what the rest of the developed world is doing instead of looking backwards. Great healthcare for all, regardless of wealth, now that would really make America great.