Ryan Tries Desperate Gamble To Get His "Better Way"

In all the brouhaha about Jeff Session's lying to Congress about his own Russian connections, you may have missed Paul Ryan's latest gambit to pass his "Better Way" agenda by trying to ram an Obamacare repeal bill through the House.

Ryan announced last night that House Republicans will release their bill to repeal and replace the ACA today. The bill will only be available for review by Republican members. There will only be one copy of the bill and it will be held in a room in the basement of the House. Only Republican members, not staff or other experts, will be allowed to read the bill and they need to visit that basement room to do so. The bill will be taken up by the House Energy and Commerce Committee but that committee will vote on the bill WITHOUT waiting for the CBO to score the plan. If the plan passes the committee, which seems certain otherwise Ryan would not have gone down this path, then it will go to the House Budget Committee before it gets voted on by the full House.

It is important to note that the last draft proposal to repeal and replace the ACA did apparently get sent to CBO to score and the numbers that came back were so horrendous that the plan went nowhere. That was just a couple of weeks ago.

The House Freedom Caucus is adamantly opposed to the refundable tax credits that were included in Ryan's last iteration and are probably still in this one. Said the group's chairman Mark Meadows, "The tax credits included in Ryan’s plan will create an entirely new entitlement program". In fact, it largely shifts subsidies for healthcare, in the GOP plan that is the refundable tax credit, from the poor to the rich. As Meadows points out, billionaires like Bill Gates will be getting a tax credit for health care under Ryan's plan. That is not the greatest optics for reforming the healthcare system. In addition, those tax credits will blow a hole in the budget as well, as they come to substantially more money than the current subsidies. Of course, the Ryan plan counts on having millions less people actually on health insurance so in the long run it may be cheaper.

This is apparently the plan that Ryan and McConnell have come up with to get the ACA repealed and then be able to move on the rest of the GOP agenda. Just get a bill, any bill, to the House floor and dare GOP members to vote against it. McConnell will have a slightly more difficult time pulling that trick off on the Senate side.

This is the kind of democracy that the GOP engages in these days. Secret plans not shared with colleagues, a vote on a bill most members won't fully understand, and daring their own party to object. Only two days ago Ryan said this, "This is how the legislative process is supposed to be designed. We’re not hatching some bill in a backroom and plopping it on the American people’s front door." You can't make this stuff up.