Walker Attacks GOP Establishment For Not Repealing Obamacare; Offers His Plan for Repealing and Replacing It

Did these guys really need Trump to let them know the voters are pissed off at the establishment?

I've been baffled by this since Bush's attempted amnesty. Any half-assed political intelligence operation can go through blogs and comments to see where the the most animated voters stand on issues.

But time and again, they don't bother with such simple intelligence-gathering.

Net result? We all know far more about the actual GOP primary electorate than the politicians trying to court it, or the vaunted consultants telling them how to do that.

So, apparently: Now the word is out. The voters are pissed off at the sell-outs of the Establishment.

So now we start getting that sort of rhetoric.

"People all across this country are fed up with Washington, I feel your pain, I'm fed up with Washington, too," Walker said. "I think about this, we were told by Republican leaders during the campaign cycle last year that we just needed a Republican Senate to be elected to repeal Obamacare. Well here we sit, you know both chambers of the United States Congress have been controlled since January by Republicans and yet there's not a bill on the president's desk to repeal Obamacare."

Walker, who has argued throughout the campaign that he is best positioned to win conservative reforms in Washington, recounted taking on legislative Republicans in Wisconsin when he won his first term as governor.

"I said to them the voters had told us they wanted is to be big and be bold," Walker said. "As you can imagine, at the time, there were some Republican lawmakers who were kind of uneasy with the idea of taking on the status quo. I said it's put up or shut up time."

One of Walker's Republican opponents immediately blasted the plan, however, calling it "Obamacare-lite".

....

One of the central elements of the Walker proposal replaces the Obama weath-based subsidies for health plans with flat tax credits, ranging between $900 and $3,000 per person, based on their age.

The Walker proposal, the first major policy rollout from his campaign, calls for "capped allotments" to states for some parts of Medicaid while allowing acute care payments to continue uncapped.

Charles Krauthammer explains (on the 6:000 Fox news show) that this is essentially a grant of catastrophic care insurance, for big, unexpected and high health costs, but leaves it to everyone to either pay for more routine costs out of pocket or with their own health plan.

Eh, kinda the version of "free health care" that I find the least objectionable, and the least disastrous.

As you probably know, Walker and Jindal have also followed Trump in calling for an end to automatic born-here citizenship.

Again, I have to ask: What the hell are you paying consultants for if they have absolutely no idea what the mood of the country is? And they don't. This apparently all comes as a huge shock to the political class.

Perhaps you've been a bit too successful in insulating yourself from your constituents, huh?

posted by Ace at 07:10 PM

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