Perspectives On The Political Landscape: What’s Next For Mitch McConnell’s Health Plan — A Push For Passage Or An Exit Strategy?

The Washington Post: The GOP’s Health-Care Bill Is Political Kryptonite
We've just seen three new polls on the Senate GOP's health-care bill, and each of them paints an increasingly dire picture for Republicans. Support for the bill is languishing between just 1 out of every 8 Americans and 1 out of every 6 Americans, according to polls from the Marist (17 percent), USA Today/Suffolk University (12 percent) and Quinnipiac University (16 percent). In each case, a majority opposes the bill. That's a level of popularity so low that it's difficult to believe the bill is being entertained. (Aaron Blake, 6/28)

The Washington Post: Hating Government Doesn’t Solve Problems
In its current iteration, the Republican Party truly seems to believe that the solution to every problem involves throwing more money at rich people. This explains the health-care fiasco in the Senate, and it’s why President Trump and Congress have yet to address a single major problem the country faces. Everything is secondary to the GOP’s two opening legislative priorities: gutting Obamacare and passing a tax cut. (E.J. Dionne Jr., 6/28)

Forbes: GOP Moderates Hint It's Time To Ditch Obamacare Repeal
Moderate Republican Senators who floated their own healthcare bill months ago that allows states to keep the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion intact now say they told you so. Back in January, GOP moderate Senators were clear they didn’t want to spend less on healthcare, particularly Medicaid, for those who gained coverage under the ACA’s expansion of that program. (Bruce Japsen, 6/28)

USA Today: Senate Health Care Bill: An Exit Strategy
Scrambling for votes on their wildly unpopular health care bill, Senate Republicans find themselves with an unappealing choice. They can anger their base by ditching seven years of promises to repeal Obamacare. Or they can strip 22 million people — more than the population of Florida — of their health coverage. (6/28)

Bloomberg: Republicans Won't Blame Trump If Health Bill Fails
It's much too soon to start digging the grave for the Senate's attempt to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. It still has a chance, even if Mitch McConnell's decision to delay a vote suggests the chance is smaller than he thought at the beginning of the week. Obviously there would be political consequences for failing to deliver the party's top agenda item for seven years. But for whom? (Jonathan Bernstein, 6/28)

The Washington Post: Trump Has Given Us No Reason To Believe He Knows Anything About Health-Care Policy
There was a revealing detail buried in the New York Times’s report on the Senate Republicans’ Tuesday evening trip to the White House to talk health care with President Trump. “A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan,” the Times’s Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin reported, “and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.” (Philip Bump, 6/28)

Boston Globe: Needed: An End To The GOP’s Pointless Health Care Saga
The Maine Republican and a few other GOP lawmakers stood their ground and, on Tuesday afternoon, forced Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to delay a vote on his misbegotten health care bill, providing a reprieve to the nation’s poorest and sickest. The McConnell bill would have left an estimated 22 million Americans without health insurance, and its failure is a sign that the centrist wing of the GOP still has a pulse. (6/28)

Axios: The GOP Base Is Getting Less Excited About Health Care
Senate Republicans have an urgent reason not to give up on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act: They don't want to break their promise to the GOP base. But the most recent polls suggest the base may not care as much as Republicans think. The bottom line: A majority still supports the plan, but support has slipped, and there is some evidence that base Trump voters do not view repeal as a top priority — and many may not punish their representatives if they vote no. (Drew Altman, 6/29)

USA Today: Pass Senate Health Care Bill ASAP
To suggest that Congress must choose between fixing the Affordable Care Act and passing the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act misses a key point: Even if the Senate bill becomes law, we will still need to fix the ACA. The National Retail Federation supports the Senate bill because it would effectively repeal the employer mandate, eliminate the ACA taxes and expand flexibility for increasingly popular health savings accounts. The Senate should pass its bill as soon as it can. (Neil Trautwein, 6/28)

The New York Times: The False Premise Behind G.O.P. Tax Cuts
With the Senate effort to upend Obamacare suspended for the Fourth of July holiday, there’s a chance to step back and examine the assumptions behind Republicans’ longstanding objections to the social safety net — as well as the flaws in those assumptions. From Ronald Reagan’s invocation of a “welfare queen,” to Mitt Romney’s derision of “takers,” to the House and Senate bills to cut taxes for the rich by taking health insurance away from tens of millions of people, the premise of incessant Republican tax cutting is that the system robs the rich to lavish benefits on the poor. (6/29)

Detroit Free Press: What If The Health Care Bill Were About Health Care?
Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency on a pledge to provide health care that covered more people, provided better benefits, and cost less than Obamacare. That he would fail to deliver that unicorn was preordained -- not by his party's failure of nerve or Democratic obstructionism, but by the laws of mathematics, which are notoriously impervious to the wishful thinking of presidents. (Brian Dickerson, 6/28)

RealClear Health: GOP Health Care Bills Defy Party's Own Ideology
The Senate’s health care proposal made it clear that Republicans, despite their rhetoric, are not interested in market-based reform. Instead, they prefer pro-business, pro-privileged reform. With Senate Republicans planning to rewrite their bill, it’s hard to predict the details of the final proposal. Nonetheless, gauging the House and Senate bills, one can guess that the broad outlines of the final package will be similar. (Christy Ford Chapin, 6/29)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Don't Fall For The Distractions: Nation's Health And Welfare At Stake
Don’t allow yourself to be distracted. While many of us are keeping a close eye on an investigation into alleged connections to Russia by President Donald Trump’s election campaign, there is a far more pressing and consequential story that deserves our attention. Senate Republicans have released their version of a health care bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act that is projected to result in about 22 million Americans losing their health insurance, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. (Jon Mizrahi, 6/29)

The New York Times: The Republicans’ Uncertainty Strategy
In their ardor to undermine and abolish the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in Congress are causing inestimable damage. Specifically, they are damaging the United States’ reputation for reliability among private companies looking to do business with the government. This is not a partisan statement. One of us is a Republican, the other a Democrat. We differ on many policies, including health care reform. (Graig Garthwaite and Nicholas Bagley, 6/29)

Cleveland Plain Dealer: If GOP Can't Pass Health Care Bill, Surrender Of Senate And Supreme Court Will Follow
The iceberg approaches for the Senate GOP's ship, but unlike with the Titanic, there is plenty of time to turn. Republicans slowed the engines and thus the speed by postponing a vote until after the July 4 recess, but they are still set to collide with the consequences of breaking a core promise to the voters who sent them to Washington. If the GOP does not disengage the country's health-care system from the disaster of Obamacare, we are headed for the misery of single-payer. This is the last chance to divert that outcome. (Hugh Hewitt, 6/28)

The Wall Street Journal: Obama’s Health-Care Audacity
President Obama has been busy since leaving office. In February he was photographed kite surfing with billionaire Richard Branson in the British Virgin Islands. March brought a visit to Hawaii, followed by four weeks in French Polynesia and yachting with David Geffen, Oprah, Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen. (Karl Rove, 6/28)

The New York Times: Tie Congress’s Paychecks To Our Good Health
Members of Congress are paid $174,000 a year, while members of Poland’s lower house of Parliament are paid $32,300 a year. Hmm. It looks as if we’re getting ripped off. Members of Congress seem to underperform compared to members of Parliament in Poland and across the democratic world. Conservatives are right to worry that feeding at the government trough breeds dependency and laziness. So I suggest we introduce pay for performance, using metrics like, say, health. (Nicholas Kristof, 6/29)