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David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist
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| After Donald Trump won the presidency, many Americans despondently wondered whether facts mattered anymore. |
| Trump,
after all, won the presidency despite a constant stream of falsehoods.
He launched his political career with a lie about Barack Obama’s
birthplace and just kept on lying,
about almost every imaginable subject. He also admitted to being a
sexual molester. He refused to release his tax returns, unlike every
other modern nominee. And yet he was elected president of the United
States. There was, and still is, ample reason for despondence. |
| But
the events of the past few months, and especially the last few days,
offer some reason for encouragement. They have demonstrated that facts
still matter and that truth has some inherent advantages over falsehood.
That’s the No. 1 lesson to take from the collapse of the Republican
health care bills. |
| In trying to pass a bill, Trump and his Capitol Hill allies had some big advantages.
They controlled every branch of the federal government, and they were
willing to ignore decades-old congressional traditions, such as holding
public hearings when writing major legislation. |
| They had only one big weakness, in fact: They weren’t dealing in reality. |
| They had spent years making up untruths about Obamacare. They said it was written behind closed doors, even though it wasn’t. They said it was a big-government takeover, when it was actually a combination of
conservative and liberal ideas. They said it was collapsing, when in
fact it has mostly worked well — and its flaws, while real, are
eminently fixable through bipartisan legislation. |
| Those
arguments served Trump, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan very well when
they were running political campaigns. Once they took power, however,
they had a problem. |
| They
didn’t have a real-world health care plan. They had a set of talking
points. When they tried to turn those talking points into a bill, the
result was a disaster. It would have taken insurance coverage from
millions of people and worsened coverage and raised costs for millions
more, many of them Republican voters. |
| Experts from across the ideological spectrum belittled their bill. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office dispassionately explained the
damage it would do. Groups representing doctors, nurses, retirees,
hospitals, insurers and people with cancer, diabetes, heart disease,
lung disease and birth defects all opposed the bill. |
| In
the House, Ryan and his leadership team were still able to jam through
legislation, in a display of partisan loyalty. In the Senate, the
famously crafty McConnell kept most of his 52 caucus members on board.
But he could not lock down the 50 he needed. |
| He had a reality problem. |
| Too
many Republican senators understood that the bill’s defenders could
make up fictions about it for only so long. And those defenders
certainly tried. In the last few days alone, both Vice President Mike
Pence and Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, made
blatantly untrue claims about the bill’s contents. |
| But,
thank goodness, a handful of senators understood that they wouldn’t be
able to create their own reality forever. Eventually, real people would
lose real health insurance and be denied real medical care for their
illnesses. |
| “I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, said Tuesday, helping to doom the latest bill. Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, explained, “This just creates more chaos and confusion.” Susan Collins, of Maine, cited the “deep cuts” to Medicaid coverage — the same cuts Pence and Price had tried to deny. |
| I
remain worried that Trump may somehow make another run at shrinking
health insurance coverage. But his basic problem isn’t going away. Facts
still matter. |
| They’ve won a resounding victory this week. |
| The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Vanita Gupta on voting rights, as well as Governor John Kasich and the Editorial Board on health care. |
