Repealing Obamacare won’t be easy
Presidential candidate Donald Trump had some mighty big plans for the day he was going to take over the Oval Office.
On Sept. 20, just weeks before the presidential election, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, stood in the rain in Richmond, Va., and he told a rally of 650 people that on day one Trump, “is going to repeal every single Obama executive order, he is going to repeal Obamacare.”
That didn’t happen.
Why not?
Something they call reality.
In fact, hardly any of the promises Trump and Pence made on the campaign trail got executive attention on the first day of the Trump residency.
On day two, however, Trump embarked on a series of hissy fits about the “dishonest” media.
He complained about those pictures that clearly indicated his inauguration was thimble-sized compared to his predecessor’s.
Obamacare is not only still going strong, last week, Trump, in a rare moment of humility, allowed that, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
Nobody?
In the words of that guy who left the White House a month and a half ago, “Come on, man.”
Governance is always more “complicated” than candidates claim it is in campaign speeches.
If it hadn’t been so complicated Republicans in the House and Senate, would have repealed and replaced Obamacare years ago.
Instead, they wrote dozens of bills that would cripple, or destroy it (one estimate claims that happened 62 times), but most of those people who’ve signed-up for Obamacare, still have their Obamacare.
And in recent weeks, Republicans all over the country, have been met by angry Obamacare recipients during their town hall meetings.
They’ve become quite a spectacle.
Meanwhile, President Trump seems to issue his pledge about “repealing and replacing” Obamacare, every time there’s a nearby microphone.
But is promises to uproot Obamacare appear to be more bluster than aspiration.
Heck. I plan to build an amusement park when I finish this.
I build the best amusement parks.
Believe me.
Obamacare does have its detractors.
But it’s never been as unpopular as Republicans claim it is.
Many of those Republicans who’re facing angry mobs at their town hall meetings, reside in states where Trump gained overwhelming support in November.
Those people are among the 43 percent of voters who think Obamacare is a good idea; compared to 41 percent who think it’s a bad idea.
Trump has certainly figured out that not everybody wants to risk losing their health care coverage.
So, he’s resorted to plan B.
“People hate it, but now they see that the end is coming, and they’re saying, ‘Oh, maybe we love it,'” he’s said.
It’s nice to know that the President of the United States is so clairvoyant that he knows when people say things, they mean exactly the opposite.
It’s just one of his many talents, I guess.
For those who genuinely need, or love Obamacare, for stuff like, well, survival, Trump doubles down.
“There’s nothing to love. It’s a disaster, folks,” he says.
While Trump and his Republicans in Congress scramble to find their way out of their thousands of pledges to uproot Obamacare, one former Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has been watching from the sidelines.
He’s amused by it all.
“And all this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about repeal, repeal, repeal-yeah, we’ll do replace, replace — I start laughing, because if you pass repeal without replace, first, anything that happens is your fault. You broke it,” Boehner says.
Well, Boehner knows how the game is played. That’s why he bowed out of Congress.
He couldn’t convince the far-right members of his own Republican caucus of the perils involved in pulling health care out from under millions of people.
That’s something that Trump still doesn’t understand.
During his speech before the joint session of Congress last Tuesday night, he called on Democrats and Republicans to work together to save Americans “from this imploding Obamacare disaster.”
Fat chance.
Democrats just aren’t in the mood to destroy something they built from scratch.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net