In state after state, a consensus is emerging that ObamaCare is failing the American people. Clinicians and medical providers either have refused to enroll or are leaving the program. Carriers in ObamaCare exchanges have been leaving, or announcing their intention to leave, the program. ObamaCare premiums and deductibles have become so cost prohibitive that 6.5 million Americans paid $3 billion in IRS penalties last year for the privilege of opting to avoid enrolling in the program.
Yet, a casual viewer tuning into a CNN panel Tuesday hosted by Kate Bolduan was led to believe that ObamaCare was a huge national asset and that repeal of the program was perhaps the singular worst policy choice made by Congress in modern times. As usual, there was no balancing conservative or Republican voice and the liberal embrace of ObamaCare was presented as consensus.
After multiple attempts to negotiate a deal with Senate Democrats on a replacement for ObamaCare, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell resolved to begin efforts to simply repeal the system without an immediate replacement. CNN’s Kate Bolduan and her guests unanimously disapproved of this decision, which they described with derogatory adjectives such as “stupid” and “desperate.”
Bolduan turned first to Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman, who opined critically on the repeal effort:
Well, it's not a winning path. That's a hypothetical, it's almost impossible to contemplate. From a common-sense perspective, it's just a stupid idea. Anyone who runs a business or has to deal with practical matters doesn't say, "I'm just going to revoke my business plan or my strategy and replace it with nothing and I'll figure it out as I go along." Nobody runs their life or their business this way, and people just don't get it. I mean, it's a non-starter! It needs to die, immediately.
ObamaCare repeal, the subject of impassioned debate on both sides of the aisle for nearly a decade, may seem like a permanent fixture to analysts like Newman. However, the ObamaCare repeal effort is a response to a program in rapid collapse that is presenting a public health and financial threat to the roughly 6.5 million (out of of roughly 42 million uninsured Americans in 2009) who enrolled in the program under threat of IRS penalty. Like Newman, CNN panelist and Democrat political activist Kirsten Powers was incapable or unwilling to address the reality of ObamaCare’s collapse or Republicans’ good and challenging effort to replace it with something more functional.
BOLDUAN: Kirsten, what then? I mean, right now, I find it fascinating-- Phil was laying it out, and Dana was talking about it too-- that essentially, what Mitch McConnell seems to be doing is forcing his own party, trying to call their bluff or force them, some of them, into very publicly flip-flopping on their position. You voted for this in 2015, and now you're not going to vote for it, now when you have a Republican president? Why is he going down this path?
KIRSTEN POWERS: Well, because I think that what they're trying to do, is that they're trying to solve a political problem, they're not trying to solve a policy problem--
BOLDUAN: Even if it brings a lot of pain to solve that political problem?
POWERS: An immediate political problem, so it's not even a long-term political problem. They made this promise, this is what the base wants, this is what the base thinks they want right now, is they want a repeal, so they're trying to repeal it. They're not actually trying to solve the policy problem, which is that there are some problems with ObamaCare and it needs to be fixed. And so I think that it may solve their short term problem, but in the long term it's going to probably cause them more problems.
It's reductive to say ObamaCare is simply a “political problem” and that Republican senators are not responding to a genuine policy challenge that concerns the American people. It’s dismissive even further to refer to these efforts as merely a politically-inspired attempt to cater to “the base” when enrollees themselves are experiencing grave financial and health ramifications from the program. But the greatest sin of the biased CNN panel was the continued lack of ideological representation from a conservative perspective—a trend that has obliterated CNN's once renowned brand as an objective news outlet and been a driving factor behind the network's recently collapsing ratings, which now have fallen to roughly half that of MSNBC and a third that of Fox News.
A transcript of the July 18 panel discussion is below:
KATE BOLDUAN: You deal with your people; I'll deal with mine. That's basically what it is right now. Joining me now to discuss: CNN political analyst and Washington Post reporter Abby Phillip is here, Yahoo Finance Rick Newman is here, and CNN political analyst and USA columnist Kirsten Powers is here as well. Great to see all of you-- where do we begin? Rick, let's start this fun with you today: on the idea of "repeal now, replace later". If this was a winning path, why was this not the first path that they took?
RICK NEWMAN: Well, it's not a winning path. That's a hypothetical, it's almost impossible to contemplate. From a common-sense perspective, it's just a stupid idea. Anyone who runs a business or has to deal with practical matters doesn't say, "I'm just going to revoke my business plan or my strategy and replace it with nothing and I'll figure it out as I go along." Nobody runs their life or their business this way, and people just don't get it. I mean, it's a non-starter! It needs to die, immediately.
BOLDUAN: Kirsten, what then? I mean, right now, I find it fascinating-- Phil was laying it out, and Dana was talking about it too-- that essentially, what Mitch McConnell seems to be doing is forcing his own party, trying to call their bluff or force them, some of them, into very publicly flip-flopping on their position. You voted for this in 2015, and now you're not going to vote for it, now when you have a Republican president? Why is he going down this path?
KIRSTEN POWERS: Well, because I think that what they're trying to do, is that they're trying to solve a political problem, they're not trying to solve a policy problem--
BOLDUAN: Even if it brings a lot of pain to solve that political problem?
POWERS: An immediate political problem, so it's not even a long-term political problem. They made this promise, this is what the base wants, this is what the base thinks they want right now, is they want a repeal, so they're trying to repeal it. They're not actually trying to solve the policy problem, which is that there are some problems with ObamaCare and it needs to be fixed. And so I think that it may solve their short term problem, but in the long term it's going to probably cause them more problems.
BOLDUAN: And from the White House perspective, we know of course, Abby, that the White House's approach towards the Senate effort was different than it was in the House. He was much more publicly involved with trying to get the House effort over the line. You can see maybe there is some remorse now coming from some of Dana Bash's reporting that they didn't do enough. Do you think that strategy changes going forward, this hands-off approach to how the Senate handles healthcare?
ABBY PHILLIP: It's a little bit different. In the House, they were kind of involved in a lot of the hand-holding of the Freedom Caucus members, and really trying to kind of get individual members over the finish line. In the Senate they didn't do that, but that's not necessarily what Mitch McConnell wanted them to do. To Dana's point, the question was, who was going to rally the outside support? Who was going to give senators when they go back home a little bit of backup so that their constituents support them in this effort? That is going to come from the outside, from the business community, but also from the bully pulpit. And there is no White House explanation for why the President never ended up going outside of Washington, outside of his properties in Florida and New Jersey, to sell this bill. They didn't do it, and now it may be too late. You know, I just wanted to say to your earlier point about why this whole "repeal now and replace later" is so extraordinary-- earlier this year, the White House, House and Senate Republicans, they evaluated this idea and determined that it was unworkable--
BOLDUAN: Right! That's right!
PHILLIP: --that it did not have the votes to pass, and that it would lead to essentially disaster. So the idea that they are coming back to it actually shows more how desperate they are at this moment. They want to make their members walk the line, but also, it seems like McConnell wants to prove that this is really, in fact, unworkable. They are not going to have the votes to do this, and that will be demonstrated very quickly, it seems, given where we are now with at least two senators a firm no on moving forward.
BOLDUAN: Very quickly, like within this hour, we could find out basically if this whole idea is now shot if more people come out-- I mean seriously, stand by everybody.
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