Trump’s Health Care Bill Controversy And Collapse

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Jul 27, 2017 - 3:39:07 PM

WASHINGTON - President Donald J. Trump—the man who would be emperor—has no clothes. His shame and the shame of those around him in his government are apparent for all to see. But he holds on to power with the unflinching support of one third of the population, even though a Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed 58 percent “strongly oppose” Mr. Trump.

The latest and most humiliating defeat came when the Senate could not muster the votes to bring the GOP’s legislation proposed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare.”

His exaggerated and unfulfilled promises are simply ignored by Mr. Trump’s core constituents because they see Mr. Trump as equalizing the score by penalizing undeserving non- Whites who they see as principal beneficiaries of government largesse.

Fe Baron of Boulder, Colo., holds up a sign during a protest against the polices of President Donald Trump Saturday, June 3, in downtown Denver. The anti-Trump rally featured speakers calling for resistance to the administration. Photo: AP/Wide World photos

“There are a lot of folks who have hostile feelings toward minority group members, toward women, especially ‘uppity’ women, that they don’t even know that they are dependent on these various government programs,” said political scientist and statistician Dr. David Bositis in an interview. “They don’t see the world that way.”

This is particularly true when it comes to the debate over the apparently doomed Republican plans to repeal and replace the ACA. “We have a horribly inefficient sick care system that routinely kills people through lack of care,” David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative reporter and founder of DCReport.org told “Democracy Now!”

“And, the Republicans’ goal here is to fulfill their promise to their supporters that they were going to stop the provision of publicly subsidized or financed health care for poor people, and they were going to address what they’ve clearly identified as the major economic problem in America: The rich don’t have nearly enough, they need to get more to the rich, and the way to do that is you take it from the sick, the disabled, the elderly and children,” Mr. Johnston said.

But lower income Whites do not see their common economic bonds with poor non-Whites. “They see the world as: health care, goes to Black people and Mexicans; health care, goes to women wanting to have abortions. That’s how they see the world. So, they’re perfectly happy to support Donald Trump,” who is seen as taking those privileges away from non-Whites, Dr. Bositis continued.

“These people don’t see themselves as benefiting from government. They do, when they’re on Medicaid, when they’re on Medicare—they think that Medicare is some private insurance plan that they paid for. They don’t think of it as a government program. Social Security, they don’t see it as, somebody who’s benefiting from government.”

President Donald Trump

For all practical purposes, Republican efforts to “repeal and replace” Obamacare—their signature campaign promise since 2010—have failed, not winning sufficient votes from among the Republican majority to overcome solid Democratic opposition to so much as bring the measure to the Senate Floor for an up-or-down vote. This was after a measure which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted would leave 22 million uninsured in a decade.

And then, Republicans were troubled by the confusing, often contradictory rhetoric coming out of the White House and Congress. The New York times calculated that Mr. Trump literally lied or misrepresented the facts 4.6 times per day, every day for his first 40 days in office. “So that’s why they choose to support Donald Trump, (even though) he’s shown himself to be a colossal oaf, incompetent, he is not capable of running the government,” said Dr. Bositis. “These people don’t view themselves in realistic terms.”

Mr. Trump is “manifestly unfit to hold a job on a city council,” said Mr. Johnston. “As the pressures of this job have come upon him, you’ve seen him behave in increasingly erratic ways. They are going to get worse. You’ll notice that he trashes people one day, praises them the next, then trashes them again.

“He has now denigrated his own attorney general, because his own attorney general didn’t act to protect him from his own wrongdoing. And what we’re going to see, going forward, is more of Donald blaming everyone else,” Mr. Johnston continued.

“And let’s remember, we were told, six months in, there’ d be so much winning, Americans will be saying, ‘It’s so much! It’s so much winning! We just can’t stand it! Please, stop!’ What have we won so far?”

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