Trumpcare Dies in the Senate. Cause: Pre-Existing Conditions

In recent days and weeks, the debate over the future of Trumpcare in the media has generated a kind of Health Metaphor Full Employment Act. You’ve read the words: Trumpcare was On Life Support. It was in Critical Condition or Guarded Condition. It was hashtagged with #Emergency Room or it was Flatlining. Its declining fortunes dovetailed with the phrases available to describe it.

Finally, on July 18, the medical language ran out about the same time the bill did: Trumpcare, aka the American Health Care Act, was dead at the age of four months and 12 days. Time of death? Depends on who you asked. Some say it died that day, when Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia announced plans to vote against the legislation.

Others think it died the day before, when GOP senators Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah stated their opposition. ...

But there’s not much debate over the cause of death: Trumpcare died from complications of its own elitist history; an inability to improve on what it was meant to replace; and the passionate and ecumenical reaction to the Trumpcare bill in social media, editorials, petitions, months of sour polling data, phone calls and — especially — in angry, deeply personal reactions from citizens at town halls across America. ...

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