Saturday, March 18, 2017

Trump Mistake

Trump is doing something UnTrump-like.   He is mixing up his messages.


Donald Trump has a message problem.   If the House is going to push through some kind of repeal and replace bill, which then gets to the Senate, Trump can say that he killed Obamacare.  Then he will go to work saying how much better Trumpcare is.

Or, if it passes the House then dies in the Senate, Trump can say that he and Republicans did their job but the mean Democrats in the Senate killed it.  Possibly in fact it will be the conservative senators who say it is Dead on Arrival who will have killed it but either way the Democrats can be blamed.

But Trump needs to the the center of attention.  He wants to be the prime mover.  So he is saying now--again--that Obamacare is dead.

However, he also says that Obamacare is dying on its own.

And he is saying that he is killing Obamacare.

If Obamacare is dead, then we will have "Trumpcare"
This is a problem that Democrats can exploit if they get their act together.   In fact any health plan will be an unpopular mess.   Nothing has consensus, even Medicare for All and even if it were free to Americans because some people would object strongly to the new entitlement.   Something unpopular will result.   Trump is muddling up what that unpopular thing will be.   Politically Trump is going to want the political disaster to be Obama's, not his.

Even his own semi-official website is confused, saying simultaneously that Obamacare is dead and that Obamacare is a disaster. 

Read it here

Trump is quoted in Breitbart's article:  “I also want people to know that Obamacare is dead,” Trump said. “It’s a dead health care plan. It’s not even a health care plan, frankly. 

Mistake.  If Obamacare is dead then the resulting mess is Trumpcare.

Trump cannot bear not being in the middle of the action, having publicly failed and having the nation's health care program have someone else's name.   It would show his political weakness and he does not want to admit to weakness, even when it would be in his interest.

1 comment:

Judy Brown said...

Peter, This is a superb article on how we fund healthcare today and why it is this way. Excellent article.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/13/unspeakable-realities-block-universal-health-coverage-in-the-us/#65110927186a


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