Why all the hubbub about repealing the ACA, aka Obamacare? I think the Republicans in Congress voted to do that 367,898 times over the past few years, but now that they actually can accomplish it, there's all this Sturm und Drang, and for all I know people will still be buying medical insurance on the exchanges when Mexico is paying us for the built Wall on the installment plan. (It's going to be a terrific Wall!)
During the campaign, Trump said repealing Obamacare ("a total disaster") would be at the top of his to-do list, and that he would replace it with "something terrific." (When mortals clear their throats, stalling for time, Trump makes the sound turr-IFF-ik.") Does "terrific" mean something better than what existed before the ACA was adopted and twenty million fewer Americans had health insurance? Because it wouldn't be hard to go back to that. Just vote to repeal the ACA for the 367,899th time, without worrying about a replacement. They weren't worrying about a replacement the first 367,898 times, so why now?
Else, show us what you got that's "terrific."
Health insurance is for many people a life-and-death question, but for whatever reason, my attention is easily drawn to such matters as Trump's golf game. Here is an account from a reporter, David Owen, who not long ago played a round with him on one of his branded courses. The idea was to review, for Golf Digest, the quality of Trump's courses. I like the following:
In my own article, I did write nice things about Trump’s courses. But Trump, nevertheless, was upset. He called the editor of Golf Digest to complain, and then he called me, on my cell phone. I was in the city on a reporting assignment unrelated to golf, and had the surreal experience of being chewed out by a future President of the United States while standing among the gravestones in the burial ground next to Trinity Church. He wasn’t upset that one of the article’s illustrations had been of a golf ball wearing a turf toupee that looked a lot like his deeply mysterious hair, or that I’d mentioned his asking two little girls at Mar-a-Lago if they wanted to be supermodels when they grew up, or that I’d described nearly tipping him five dollars after momentarily mistaking him for his club’s parking-lot attendant, or that I’d written that he’d introduced one of his club’s members to me not by name but as “the richest guy in Germany.” He was upset that I hadn’t written that he’d shot 71—a very good golf score, one stroke under par. I hadn’t written that because he hadn’t shot 71. . . .
And Owen goes on to explain how they'd been horsing around, taking extra shots, picking up on the green, etc., and that if the next president, who hit the ball a long way but had a lot of trouble from a hundred yards in, was going to say he had shot a 71, he might as well have said 69. This reminded me of the casual way in which the Speaker of the House once claimed to have been a sub-3-hour marathoner ("two-fifty-something") when, in fact, he finished the only one he ever ran in more than 4 hours. Maybe the macho swagger of so many political conservatives inclines them to, um, exaggerating their prowess in the accredited proving grounds of the American masculinity cult. You can sense a similar impulse, I think, in the way their tongues lovingly loll over the syllables in the names of the guns they own--a SIG Sauer P220 Combat, or whatever. A guy with one of those in his britches isn't going to be caught worrying about sick people with no health insurance.
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