Guaranteed Failure?

I promise I will keep this one short:

So awful is the new Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, so manifestly will it fail, and so maladroit its construction, that some of our more cynical observers have taken to thinking along somewhat different lines.

That is to say they believe the Republican leadership is crashing through a flawed piece of legislation knowing full well that it will fail to pass through Congress. They have built in so many obvious points of failure and incurred the opposition of absolutely every major industry organization — the doctors, hospitals, and nurses of America have all come out as opposed to the plan — that no Republican member of Congress can be comfortable supporting the legislation. This doesn’t even take into consideration that the plan seems deliberately to annoy both conservative and moderate policy wonks within the party. The entire effort thus appears to be a massive subterfuge. It is a ploy to get the Republicans off the hook for their seven year long tirade about Obamacare without ever having thought much about what they would replace it with.

So here they are face-to-face with the reality that Obamacare needs tweaking and not replacing. How do they get to tweak and not “repeal and replace”? By failing in the latter effort! They can then go forlorn to their supporters and say that they tried but were prevented from following through by forces beyond their control. So, as a poor alternative, they had to go back and tweak.

Sorry, they will cry, we gave it a shot, but you know how Washington is.

Then, fresh from this ‘defeat’ they can get on with the real business they want to ram through: notably tax reform and huge tax cuts for the wealthy.

This different perspective makes sense. Indeed, it is the only interpretation of the current plan that does make sense. It gets the Republican leadership off the hook from having to do something that they now realize they cannot do, it relieves them from blame for any further bad outcomes of Obamacare, such as more premium price increases, and it clears the legislative schedule for the work they really want to get on with.

The only flaw in their strategy appears to be Trump, whose incompetence might just interrupt them. After all he promised health care for all, lower prices, and better care, plus the abolition of Obamacare. He is already pumping up their new plan as being ‘great’ and ‘beautiful’. Someone needs to whisper in his ear and get him to turn his attention elsewhere. That doesn’t appear to be a difficult task. His attention span is close to zero. All they need to do is to get one of his favorite TV news shows to run a segment on how the new plan is so successful and that it has already been passed through Congress, and he will be convinced of this as reality. Then they can quietly fail and move on.

Sounds like a plan, or non-plan, to me.