Obama Care Isn't Going to Self-destruct

President Trump had Paul Ryan pull the House bill so there will be no vote on it today or for the foreseeable future.  They were short ten to fifteen votes by President Trump’s admission.  No democrats crossed party lines to vote for it.  Trump called it “close”.   They just announced today’s high in Chicago was 77 degrees.  That’s a spring time indicator for sure.  They interrupted Days of our Lives for Paul Ryan’s interview and the picture took a while to come on.  But it did.  Paul Ryan didn’t try to varnish over the facts.  He had failed.  There’s no doubt about that.  Then they had the Trump interview in the Oval Office.  He spoke for longer.  He says that there are no plans to bring up another bill and we’ll just have to let Obama Care explode or self destruct or whatever they hope it’s going to do.   Both Trump and Shawn Hannity afterward said that democrats themselves would take the initiative and sponsor a bi-partisan bill with the Republicans saying that a bi-partisan bill would be better for everyone anyhow.  I’d have trouble disagreeing with that.   Trump says Chuck Schummer and Nancy Pelosi are the big losers because “They’ll own Obama Care”.

The rumor is going around that Donald Trump doesn’t care what’s actually in the Health Care bill just as long as he’s willing to “make the deal”.  Some have even proposed that if a democrat proposed a more liberal health care bill Trump might go for that because in a book that came out in 2000 Trump endorsed single payer health care.   The idea was put forth that the KOCH brothers would twist arms and dangle carrots to get those ten or fifteen republicans to vote for the Health Care bill.  In exchange Trump announced today officially that the XL pipeline is going through to Texas as originally planned.  Thom Hartman advanced this theory this morning.  But Norman Goldman states that you’re operating in a fish bowl with this bill and if there are ANY changes to the bill the hospital associations and drug companies and all the rest will take note of it and sound the alarm.  They could never pull off any sneak votes in the dead of night as proposed.   It’s been pointed out that we could “turn the whole thing over to the states” so that if California wants to have single payer health care like Massachusetts did back a dozen years ago, then nothing would prevent them from doing that.  After all “Covered California” is economically healthy.  It would be all those republican red states that would suffer the most.

(Media reflection on the failure)  Shortly after House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) unveiled the Republican health-care plan on March 6, President Trump sat in the Oval Office and queried his advisers: “Is this really a good bill?”  And over the next 18 days, until the bill collapsed in the House on Friday afternoon in a humiliating defeat — the sharpest rebuke yet of Trump’s young presidency and his negotiating skills — the question continued to nag at the president.  Even as he thrust himself and the trappings of his office into selling the health-care bill, Trump peppered his aides again and again with the same concern, usually after watching cable news reports chronicling the setbacks, according to two of his advisers: “Is this really a good bill?”  In the end, the answer was no — in part because the president himself seemed to doubt it.  “We were a little bit shy — very little, but it was still a little bit shy, so we pulled it,” Trump said Friday afternoon in an interview with The Washington Post.  For Trump, it was never supposed to be this hard. As a real estate mogul on the rise, he wrote “The Art of the Deal,” and as a political candidate, he boasted that nobody could make deals as beautifully as he could. Replacing Obamacare, a Republican bogeyman since the day it was enacted seven years ago, was Trump’s first chance to prove that he had the magic touch that he claimed eluded Washington.

The war in Syria is heating up yet again with signs that the conflict may soon be about to take greater international dimensions. This is all due to greater Israeli participation and aggression in Syria against the Syrian military and on the behalf of terrorist organizations fighting against the Syrian government. The questions that remain, however, are whether or not the Israelis are willing to tempt the resolve of the anti-terrorist coalition of Syria, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia and how steadfast that resolve of those powers might actually be.  In the past week, we have seen an escalation in the Syrian conflict the likes of which we have not seen in decades in terms of Israeli-Syrian tensions as well as the potential for a clash of nuclear world powers in the Middle East as a combat theatre  After a mobilization of U.S. troops near Manbij – designed to prevent the Syrian military from retaking the city and as a means to stop combat between Turkish and Kurdish forces – Israel launched an air attack on Syrian targets near Palmyra, the Zionist settler state’s furthest penetration into Syria yet. Israel claimed it was bombing an Iranian-Hezbollah weapons convoy while the Syrian government claimed Israel had targeted Syrian military positions who were in the process of combating ISIS. Regardless, Israel clearly violated international law and the concept of national sovereignty.