L’Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) resta in vigore.
Il New York Times ha osservato in modo perfido: “For Mr. Trump, it is a rather brutal reminder that campaigning is the easy part”.
Il presidente americano, nelle scorse settimane, aveva già lamentato candidamente, scoprendo con incredulità qualcosa che dovrebbe essere chiaro a tutti, l’incredibile complessità della questione. “Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” aveva detto. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated”. Fatto sta che il Ryancare, la nuova riforma della sanità che prende il nome dallo speaker della Camera, non ha i voti sufficienti tra i repubblicani. La cosa non deve sorprendere. In un articolo del gennaio scorso scrivevo che molti elementi dell’eredità di Obama saranno difficili o impossibili da cambiare in maniera permanente; e a proposito di Obamacare, che “Trump dovrà fare i conti con una logica politica molto semplice: è facile ostacolare l’introduzione di nuovi benefici, ma è molto difficile cancellare quelli che ci sono già”.
Lo spiega oggi l’editorial board del New York Times: “Many far-right conservatives opposed the bill because it would not have completely repealed the A.C.A., or Obamacare. And some more moderate Republicans said they would vote no because the bill would cause immense damage — 24 million people would lose health insurance over 10 years and millions of others would be hit with higher premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs. Surely, many of them were also thinking about a recent Quinnipiac University poll showing that 56 percent of American voters opposed the legislation and just 17 percent supported it. When Barack Obama was president, Republicans in the House voted dozens of times to repeal the health care law in a symbolic exercise meant to appeal to their base. But never did they present a plan that could improve on the law for their constituents”.
Aggiungo una considerazione di John Cassidy sul New Yorker: “The larger lesson here is that conservatism failed and social democracy won. After seven years of fulminating against the Affordable Care Act and promising to replace it with a more free-market-oriented alternative, the House Republicans—who are in the vanguard of the modern conservative movement—failed to come up with a workable and politically viable proposal. Obamacare survived, and that shouldn’t be so surprising. When it comes to health-care policy, there is no workable or politically viable conservative alternative”.
