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SEPTEMBER

**18, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

The Non-Plan to Replace the ACA Isn't Just Trump's

President Trump has had ridicule heaped upon him, and rightly so, for
promising-for the umpteenth time, by actual count-on a telethon
earlier this week that his super-duper replacement for Obamacare was
ready and would soon be unveiled. As

**The Washington Post**'s Catherine Rampell has documented, this came
as news not just to telethon viewers, but also to Trump administration
health policy officials
,
who admitted they knew of no such plan, ready or not.

In one sense, though, Trump is getting a bum rap. The failure to produce
a replacement for the Affordable Care Act isn't his alone; it's that
of the entire Republican Party and American conservative movement.
During Barack Obama's presidency, Republican representatives and
senators voted dozens of times to repeal the ACA, but never once
advanced a bill to replace it. Since Trump became president, that
failure has only continued.

The problem lies with America's über-capitalist brand of
conservatism. The American right wants to entrust health care to private
health insurance companies, which can only afford to cover people with
pre-existing conditions if they get the kind of massive income boost
that the ACA provided them by offering their compatriots a subsidized
way to buy insurance from them. Roughly 20 million Americans now get
their insurance through the ACA, and if it were repealed, not only would
they lose it, but so would millions more with pre-existing conditions
whom the companies would refuse to keep on their rolls at affordable
rates.

Other schools of conservatism, more oriented to national solidarity than
to laissez-faire capitalism, have embraced state-provided health
coverage, beginning with that of Otto von Bismarck's Germany in the
1880s. But that's not conservatism American-style, which is why
Republican elected officials, right-wing columnists, and conservative
think tanks have uniformly failed to devise a replacement for the ACA,
though they've had ten and a half years since its enactment to come up
with one.

This, then, is a fish that doesn't stink only from its comb-over head.
It's the whole body of American conservative thought that is rotten.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The Conservative Voter Fraud Swarm

Interlocking sets of legal organizations comprise what amounts to a
marketing campaign for the false narrative of stolen elections. BY
BRITTANY GIBSON

Mike Espy to Democrats: Don't Write Off Mississippi!

The former Democratic congressman is close behind incumbent Republican
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in the latest poll, but party officials won't
open their wallets. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

Prophet of a Lost World

John Dunlop specialized in labor/management conflict resolution, but his
deal making grew more perilous as corporate anti-unionism grew. BY
NELSON LICHTENSTEIN

United Colors of the Apocalypse

A Pantone series for 2020 BY DAVID BIELOH

One Million Minutes B.C.

*Before Coronavirus BY PETER KUPER

Unsanitized: The Fed's Policy Choices and Our Maldistributed Recovery

And a moment of Zen for misuse of research. This is The COVID-19 Daily
Report for September 18, 2020. BY DAVID DAYEN

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