AHCA - One More time With Feeling!

[Labster]

Just updating here for non-US news junkies that the bill is dead once again.  It pretty much happened when John McCain came out against his BFF-for-life Lindsay Graham's bill.  McCain said he might actually vote for the bill if it had gone through the full committee process, but basically he's tired of doing legislation outside of regular order.  "Regular order" means a lot of subtle things, but it comes down to "the complete opposite of the process on this bill."  Anyway, congrats to him on trying to hold our institutions together.

They did hold exactly one scheduled hearing on the latest bill, which was just long enough to get a photo op of people in wheelchairs being dragged out and arrested.  The amount of political capital, and just general goodwill that was squandered on this debate, it's just stupid.  Well, maybe I should look at it as a political capital loan -- win elections by making impossible promises, but then lose out when you can't actually meet your goals.

I'm already halfway convinced that single payer is the way to go.

Yep.  That's a thing now.  Basically every liberal Senator who is thinking of running for President signed on to cosponsor Bernie's "Medicare for All" bill (which is technically single-payer and not Medicare expansion).  The reason for this: no one wants to be flanked on the left in the next election.  The right has finally gotten the left to agree that Obamacare is terrible.  But, you know, still better than their plan.