Trumpcare 2.0
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Trumpcare won’t die.
The White House, with Vice President Mike Pence as the point man, is trying to resuscitate the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, and the House may produce a new bill this week. Republicans have a big reason to do so: They’ve been promising repeal for seven years and now control both Congress and the White House.
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PRIVACY POLICY
But they also still have a big problem, the same one that doomed Trumpcare 1.0. Republican leaders don’t have a coherent health care plan. The only bills they have come up with would deprive millions of people of health insurance, and the party hasn’t been willing, at least so far, to accept the political costs of doing so.
These two recent columns of mine have more details. Josh Barro, of Business Insider, put it well yesterday: If the Republicans come up with a new proposal, Barro wrote, it “will be very unpopular, with a loud and angry constituency opposing it, and no significant political constituency eager for it, except for rich people who want the tax cut embedded within” the bill.
To follow the debate the rest of this week, I recommend both traditional news sources and Twitter. In particular, you can learn a lot from the Twitter accounts of Margot Sanger-Katz, Sarah Ferris, Matt Fuller, Peter Suderman,Topher Spiro, Sarah Kliff and Jonathan Cohn, among others.
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