The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka The Affordable Care Act will remain the law of land after the primary legislative aim of the GOP-controlled Congress to repeal it failed to gain enough support for passage in the U.S. Senate on Monday evening. President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law in March of 2010 and the GOP majority in the House has in vain held votes to repeal it ever since. After ramrodding their repeal of the ACA through the House in May, the GOP replacement for it effectively failed muster in the Senate on Monday evening. This is a huge defeat for GOP majority and for President Trump with the defection of two more GOP senators.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has failed to get the required 50 votes to pass the bill. The two GOP Senators in question, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky jumped ship on their party leaving the ACA repeal effort to crash and burn in a flaming pile of fail! Majority Leader McConnell has stated the Senate will vote in the coming days to repeal the ACA with a two year delay to find a replacement plan, but that remains ambiguous.
The ACA repeal appears dead in the water for the here and now and it is my hope it will stay that way at least for the foreseeable future. It remains to be seen if the remedies to the ACA can be made with a bipartisan effort. There is a growing push from the left for a single payer system or at very least for a public option in the health insurance market place. Realistically, I don’t hold out much hope for this with a GOP-majority Congress. That said, I am hoping there will be ample motivation to examine all possible options on the table. If not a public option then perhaps a private extraction. After the latest legislative debacle in the Senate with the scathing rebuke of “Trumpcare” before it even got off the launching pad, one would think anything is negotiable going forward. May the result benefit a decided majority of citizens.