EDITORIAL: Showtime in the Senate

OPINION:

Now is the time for all good Republicans to put up or shut up. There’s no more time for big talk about repealing and replacing Obamacare. The hot air sent spiraling into the cosmos over the eight years of the Obama administration, by big talkers safe in the expectation that whatever they did would get only a veto, was enough to raise the temperature of this planet and maybe Saturn and Pluto as well.

But the Senate parliamentarian has decreed that the clock finally runs out Sept. 30 on the availability of the reconciliation process that would require just 51 votes to repeal Obamacare. After Oct. 1, 60 votes will be required, and 60 votes to approve anything won’t be available.

If the promise to repeal and replace Obamacare can’t be redeemed, the party that’s old but not so grand won’t be believed in the future about anything. The men and women who talk so bigly on the campaign stump will get only hoots and hollers next year, and they’ll deserve every one of them.

If the Republicans aren’t willing or able to rid the suffering public of Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment, Bernie Sanders is willing to do it, if in his fashion. Bernie thinks Obamacare doesn’t go far enough because Congress won’t spend enough. Amid considerable noise, though not much smoke and hardly any fire at all, he introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2017, a bold scheme to put the nation’s health care in the hands of the government once and for all. The senator makes lots of promises of pie in the sky, but prefers not to talk about how much it would cost, and how the rest of us would pay for it.

“The size of the tax increase,” he says, “would be determined in a separate bill.” The Urban Institute did the math last year on an earlier iteration of the Sanders scheme and said it would cost $32 trillion — that’s trillion, with a t — over 10 years. Since pie, in the sky or elsewhere, invariably costs more than the pastry chefs say it would, the price of Berniecare would be more than that, probably a lot more.

The Medicare for All Act of 2017 would blow a hole as big as Boston in the deficit, a hole so big that the pols who light the match might well be tempted to quit calculating just how big it is. Unfazed by the prospective price, Medicare for All was warmly embraced by 16 Democratic senators. If the Republicans can get by with fatuous and irredeemable promises, why not?

Among the 16 — a third of the Senate Democrats — include several who regard themselves as 2020 presidential prospects, including Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But not every Democrat is eager to buy the fantasy. Only one of the 10 Democratic senators up for re-election next year in a state won by President Trump, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, has joined the chorus.

Senate Republicans, eager to divert attention from their own failure to do what they insisted they could and would do, are giddy at the distraction provided by Mr. Sanders’ single-payer proposition.

“Bernie Sanders’ home state had passed a similar plan,” John Barrasso of Wyoming notes, pointing to the abandonment in December 2014 of a universal health care law, Green Mountain Care, enacted earlier in Vermont. “They realized they would have to double the taxes collected on the people of that state to pay for it, because it was so expensive.”

President Trump can’t resist applying the needle to his Republican fellows, and who can blame him? “Bernie Sanders is pushing hard for a single-payer health care plan,” he tweeted the other day. “I told Republicans to approve health care fast or this would happen.”