When U.S. Sen. John McCain unsuccessfully ran for president in 2008, even some within the Republican Party thought he was too much of a maverick for their tastes.
McCain, a war hero who is now battling against possibly terminal brain cancer, shows that nothing has changed about his independent streak.
Hailed on Tuesday by President Donald Trump and Senate Republican leaders for returning to Washington from his sick bed to cast the decisive vote that kept alive GOP hopes to repeal and replace Obamacare, McCain flipped the script early this morning and cast another decisive vote, this time to kill the effort.
This was not, though, as much of a reversal as it appears to be. The Arizona senator said on Tuesday that he didn’t like the totally partisan process and predicted it would ultimately fail. Why he felt the need in the first place to prolong the inevitable for a few days is a bit odd, but hopefully it will force what McCain says is needed: a bipartisan effort to either correct some of the deficiencies with Obamacare, or to come up with a suitable replacement.
One of the reasons Obamacare has been resisted since its inception seven years ago is that it was enacted without a single Republican vote. A similar political and public resistance would have occurred had the Republicans gotten their way and replaced it without a single Democratic vote.
The truth is, neither party has come up with the correct solution yet to this complex problem of providing health care to most Americans without bankrupting the government.
Obamacare is too expensive, too complicated and too cumbersome for insurers and medical providers. The alternatives that the Republicans have presented so far, though, would throw too many millions back onto the rolls of the uninsured and possibly cripple health care in rural, poorer communities such as ours.
A middle ground is needed, and that’s where bipartisanship must come into play.
