New Orleans  They might have the votes, and they might not have the votes to get this mess of a healthcare abomination out of hardcore ideologue and Speaker Paul Ryan’s House, but all signs point to a squeaker that will smell like it crawled out of a dumpster by the time it gets to the Senate.

We already know that the President and his people will say virtually anything without regard to fact or fantasy, and they seem to be using that proclivity in hyper-fashion with recalcitrant House of Representative moderates, saying that the Senate will fix and modify the mess. Most folks on the used car lot that Congress has become would walk away from that lemon.

For the suicidal, largely anonymous so-called Freedom Caucus, they have bent over backwards to take something terrible and make it even more horrid. They want work mandates for Medicaid despite all evidence that establishes that not only are these ineffective, punitive, and needless, but that people need healthcare to get well, so that they can work. Ok, here you go! Some of them want funding of some programs to stop immediately rather than in 2018, so, hey, let’s accelerate the death spiral for another vote or two. Anything goes these days.

And, talk about pork barreling and horse trading for votes in this district or that, and any principles go out the window. Congressman from upstate New York want to push the share of the Medicaid bill from the county coffers to the state for a billion or more, no problem, if these couple of Congressman are Republican and the Governor of New York is a Democrat. Heck, make him pay up. Some coal miners with black lung realizing that they could be hammered by cutbacks in Medicaid that are keeping them alive, no problem, write in an exception for coal miners with black lung.

Are you seeing a pattern here? Even if something emerges, it is going to be jerry-rigged like a Rube Goldberg contraption. They are already asking the American people to pretend this will be some kind of viable health plan, and now they are going to ask us to pretend it will actually work.

No one likes this thing. Republican and Democratic governors are aghast. Doctors, hospitals and the elderly associations are up in arms.

This is clearly no longer an exercise in healthcare policy. This is all about big league politics now. They need to prove on the first bill coming out of the Trump barn that they can win. No matter what or how bad the smell.

Whatever happens in this first vote, no one can believe anymore that this is going to end well.

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Please enjoy Big Boys  from the late great Chuck Berry.

Preservation Hall Jazz Band Santiago.

Thanks to KABF.