Morning Joe regular John Heilmann put the Republican healthcare dilemma in a nutshell.
"Is it a good or bad situation if you take the popularity of the bill and add it to the president's approval rating and you're still under 50?" he said. "That's not good, right? That's not a good combo. I'm not good at math but that's not a good situation.
Mika Brzezinski pointed out new polls that show the Republicans' effort to replace Obamacare struggling.
"Four polls yesterday show how deeply they unapprove of their plan. People doesn't like it. They find it to be insulting," she said.
"Look at those numbers right there," Scarborough said. "You can always tell when somebody's doing something they don't really believe in or that their heart's just not in it. And these Republicans have specifically said from the beginning, told me off the record on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, hey, we have to do it first, we don't want to do it first but we have to do it first, because we've got to cut enough from health care so we can do our tax bill and not go through reconciliation.
He said he gets the sense that Republicans would rather just get past it.
"You get a 16%, 17% approval rating when you come out with a bill that you can only describe as mean. How do you define mean?" he said.
"Mean -- I guess one way legislatively you could define it would be that you actually use health care as a chance to slash spending, so you can go on to a tax cut bill later on. And it's not like the burden is shared. It's not like we're going to go after Medicare, that is a middle class entitlement, and Medicaid. No, no, no."
Uh, Joe? Yes, yes, yes, they ARE going after Medicaid. But go on:
"They're not touching the middle class entitlements. They're not touching the entitlements that their donors use. They're going after the poorest of the the poor. And people in rural America, middle America, they're the ones they're attacking," Scarborough said.
"Again, you just can't even dispute it because they've admitted it and they're cutting health care for the poorest Americans so they can move forward with a big tax cut."
"These numbers are completely understandable, and it's surprising they're not lower than they are because the people drafting this health care bill in the House and the Senate are so far removed from the reality of everyday life that it is nearly shocking when you realize who they are," Heilmann concluded.
