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Thursday, June 22, 2017

Obamacare stroll down memory lane

   Some folks seem to either not know or perhaps conveniently are forgetting how "Obamacare" became law. I thought I would help bring some of it back for your perusal. 
   The Democrats controlled all three branches of legislature and were driving this forward against the Republican resistance to a one payer system. Nancy Pelosi could not get their version of a healthcare bill past the Republican opposition. the Senate had a Democratic super majority. They could pass anything against any Republican opposition. Since all revenue bills have to start in the house, The senate grabbed HR3590 a bill about military housing, stripped it of all its original language and stuffed Obamacare into its corpse.
  The Senate usually then sends their version back to the house, a bit of arm wrestling and negotiating happens and a compromise piece of legislation gets passed by both houses. Well, the unthinkable happened during this process. The voters in MA handed "Ted Kennedy's" seat over to Republican Scott Brown. As painful as this was for the Democrats on principle, it was more damaging in its reality. They were about to lose their super majority in the Senate. Harry Reid (D-NV) was in a hard place. If they sent the bill to the House any change made would require a new Senate vote, one he could not get the required 60 votes on. 
   What happened next is why Obamacare failed. rather than iron out a bipartisan bill, Reid met with his House counterpart Pelosi and agreed to pass the unfinished, unpublished, unread bill into law without changes by a party line then the Senate would pass a separate bill called the Reconciliation Act of 2010. That is how Obamacare became law. Sadly had the legislation gone through channels, many of the glaring mistakes would have been repaired and the costs could have been potentially reduced or contained.But, at least we did get perhaps the most absurd political statement of all time from it:


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