Healthcare is looking like a loser for all sides

Allahpundit:
Doesn’t really matter. This is a game of hot potato at this point. The Freedom Caucus took the blame, fairly or not, for tanking the original House health-care bill last month. Now they’ve hatched an amendment that makes the bill more palatable to conservatives, letting states waive the federal mandates for Essential Health Benefits and community rating subject to certain conditions, but which does little to make it more appealing to Republican moderates. The stuff that would make it more palatable to them, like rolling back planned cuts to Medicaid, isn’t in the new version and would only spook House conservatives all over again if it were. In fact, if anything, because it gives states the power to let insurers charge people with preexisting conditions higher premiums under some circumstances, the new bill is arguably a heavier lift for moderates than the original bill was. (And possibly will prove even less appealing to voters.) But from the conservative point of view, that’s okay. The Freedom Caucus amendment achieves its core goal of flipping the hot potato from the right over to the moderates, who’ll now take the blame among Trump’s base if they vote no and the bill fails and will take the blame from everyone else if they vote yes and it passes.

If they end up signing off, it’ll only toss the hot potato to a third player — the Senate. And guess what? They’re already preparing to toss it right back....
...
Congress has shown a knack for making something that should be easy hard to do, and this is certainly the case with healthcare insurance.  Here we are stuck with a bill that was sold through the use of fraud and deceit and Democrats are acting like the mess is popular and Republicans seem to be backing away from the commitment they made to voters to repeal the mess.

Probably the best case at this point is to have the House pass the revised bill and let the Democrats in the Senate kill it so that the blame for the Obamacare abomination is back on their shoulders and will hurt them in the 2018 election where Democrats are defending seats in red states.

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