Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer dismissed the suggestion that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) inability to bring the Senate GOP health care legislation up for a vote this week and postponing it until after the Fourth of July holiday was for no other reason that people not wanting entitlements from Obamacare to go away.
Krauthammer blamed the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid and not a failure of communication or a lack of communication between the leaderships of the two chambers of Congress for McConnell’s shortcoming.
“Their problem is not — forgive me — this is not a failure of communication as in ‘Cool Hand Luke,'” he explained. “This is a failure of expectations. The country does not want to see the entitlements that were handed out by Obamacare retracted. That’s the issue. It’s not communication. It’s not the lack of coordination between the House and Senate. It’s the fact that Medicare was inflated. It was supposed to be for women and poor children and the disabled. It was inflated by Obama to include able-bodied workers up to 400 percent of the poverty line. So this is completely out of its original intent.”
“The fight now, and the reason a lot of moderate Republicans are scared is because under this bill it goes from 400 percent down to 350 percent,” Krauthammer continued. “This is a marginal retrenchment of what makes you eligible for Medicaid. And people are used to what was. They don’t want to give it back. That’s the reason that Obamacare repeal is in trouble. The country is not where it was seven years ago. It’s the reason that the left usually wins, because when you hand out goodies since the New Deal, it is extremely hard to bring them back. That’s the core issue here.”
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