My personal feeeling about the midterms was that the GOP House had brought it on themselves by failing to Make America Great Again by not building the wall, and not supporting Trump's border control efforts.
However, that's not the only problem the GOP has. In the Wall Street Journal (paywalled, but quoted extensively at Instapundit) Jason Lewis points to another factor—McCain's last backstab of the GOP, when the Senator, who never thought of party loyalty, voted against the repeal of Obamacare.
Here's what Lewis says the GOP was trying to do:
The problem was—and still is—that under ObamaCare all policyholders are charged as if they are sick. If restoring a modicum of traditional underwriting by loosening the Affordable Care Act’s strict age-rating rule discriminated against the old, then ObamaCare was—and is—discriminating against the young. The AHCA would have relieved this problem by allowing states to opt out of ObamaCare’s most onerous mandates and instead cover the most difficult-to-insure with $138 billion worth of high-risk pools. That would have arrested the ObamaCare “death spiral” and, as the Congressional Budget Office admitted, reduced both premiums and the deficit.
Emerging in response to World War II-era wage and price controls, health insurance has been tied to employment. When older workers lose their coverage along with their job, it creates a serious barrier for entering the individual market, as pre-existing conditions are often the result of age. This is primarily due to an unfair tax code that gives employers but not individuals tax breaks for buying insurance.
Again, the AHCA sought to even the playing field by offering a refundable tax credit anyone could use to buy an individual plan. The bill also would have expanded tax-deferred health savings accounts to help cover deductibles, copayments and over-the-counter expenses.
All these provisions were an attempt to alleviate the pre-existing condition problem, not exacerbate it. To be sure, instead of running away from health-care reform after it failed, Republicans should have leaned in on the plan’s most important aspects. But because the AHCA didn’t pass, it was impossible to refute the lies about it.
Who Lost The House? John McCain, November 12, 2018
Instapundit's' Stephen Green writes
McCain claimed to have been voting his conscience, but in reality he was just sticking it one last time to Trump—and his fellow Congressional Republicans.
A 2007 Vanity Fair profile of McCain called him a Prisoner of Conscience . This, as I wrote in 2008, referred to "his habit of making his own decisions without reference to such considerations as party loyalty, the wishes of his constituents, or the interests of the United States of America. It's all about him and his conscience."
Of course Obamacare isn't really a National Question issue, but if you want to know how bad the system that McCain voted to keep was, let Michelle Malkin explain it:
And this four-part series:
McCain was really bad not only for his party, but for America.
