The Party of Ideas (TM)

The last attempt to gut the Affordable Care Act and strip health insurance from tens of millions of people and make the insurance for people who retain it much worse was being led by someone who by his own admission had no idea what he was talking about:

But now that it’s over, the old Graham is back and more than willing to laugh at how improbable it was that a national security expert briefly held the national limelight as a supposed health policy wonk.

Graham, though, said he was not alone in his lack of understanding of health care. “Nobody in our conference believes Obamacare works. It must be replaced. But until now, we didn’t know how to do it,” Graham told reporters in the Capitol on Tuesday, audio of which is posted below.

A reporter pointed out that such ignorance at this late stage is hard to understand. “You’ve been working to overhaul this for seven years. Why is this so hard?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve been doing it for about a month. I thought everybody else knew what the hell they were talking about, but apparently not,” Graham clarified, adding he had assumed “these really smart people will figure it out.”

The crash course in health policy has been a romp, Graham said. “I’ve enjoyed this more than anything. I’ve learned so much about health care in other states — Pennsylvania, Alaska, Ohio,” he said, adding that he even learned about his own state. “South Carolina, we have 11 predominantly African-American counties that have unique health care needs and one size doesn’t fit all, even within your state. I looked at the history of welfare reform, and I think we can replicate that here.”

That Graham thinks reforming health care is analogous to welfare suggests he may still have a ways to go on his journey.

When you start with “Obamacare is bad” as an essentially religious dictum, than anything that’s substantially different is better, QED. That’s pretty much what the Republican conference knows about health care. And they came frighteningly close to passing one of their ridiculous proposals.

In conclusion, Jimmy Kimmel needs to stick to comedy.