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What Are We Going to Do When Republicans Don’t Repeal Obamacare?
First, some history. Before 2010, Republicans said, “We can’t do anything as a minority party, but give us the House, and we’ll repeal Obamacare.” After 2010, Republicans said, “We only have the House, we can’t do anything. GIve us the Senate, and we’ll repeal Obamacare.” After 2014, Republicans said, “We can’t repeal Obamacare with just the House and Senate, we need the White House.”
Now, it’s 2017. Republicans have both houses of Congress and the White House. And now they are saying, “We can’t possibly repeal Obamacare, but maybe we can fix it.”
It’s time to face the reality that the Republicans are never going to repeal Obamacare. The likelihood is that most, probably all of it, will remain, with some changes around the edges. It will still be mandated to have health care insurance. The Government will still dictate what health insurance plans must cover; and they must cover a lot. Insurance companies will be required to cover “pre-existing conditions.” (i.e. you don’t have to buy insurance until after you get sick.) There will still be massive subsidies for both insurance companies and lower income people.
The dilemma to Republicans is they want to leave all of that stuff in place, but make it cost less and do away with the absurdly expensive, high-deductible plans that have become fixtures of Obamacare. They can’t. It’s an economic impossibility. There’s no shortage of good ideas and market-based solutions that would actually work; but there’s no stomach in the GOP for braving the nasty editorials in the New York Times and the sob stories the cable news channels would cook up.
So, when the Republicans once again fail/let us down/betray us, what are we going to do? I don’t even have a suggestion. I just want to know what you think.
Published in Healthcare
Continue cleaning house. They have run on repeal for 3 elections. Now that they can, if they don’t, they need to be ousted in the next primary.
Mark Steyn described what is happening years ago. Once the government is put in charge, you never again discuss moving back to private sector solutions, you just debate which party will be in charge of the latest ‘reforms’.
The nearest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program.
The article indicates that it’s a branding strategy around the eventual replacement. Did you read something I didn’t?
Do you think it’s a good idea to repeal Obamacare without legislation in place to fix the broken Healthcare system?
It took too long. People got inured to being assured of being insured. The ACA is surrounded by political scar tissue seven years on, and Republicans don’t want to start any bleeding by taking out the core of the problem. Which I guess will just have to do – if the Republicans are so unable to make a case in defense of government non-intervention in healthcare markets, then repealing the ACA would just lead to political disaster. And if the public doesn’t really understand the difference between health insurance and health care, if the electorate is just going to see a full-scale repeal effort as depriving poor sick people of their health, and if Republicans can’t be bothered to educate the public, then there will be no right-wing re-envisioning of healthcare.
I know not others shall do but for me I reject the duopoly’s fear mongering. We need to factionize into multi-parties in order to bring back a competitiveness in political discussions.
I don’t trust Republicans to actually repeal it. I think they might “brand” their little nips and tucks around the edges as a form of repeal; but I don’t believe that the substance of the law is going to change.
Fix it … repeal it …
Blame Trump. He is the head of the Republicans now.
Thanks. Now my brain is stuck in a loop.
Giving someone with a pre existing condition coverage is not ‘insurance’. It’s welfare. Forcing insurers to provide coverage to 26 year olds as ‘minor dependents’ is not a free market private sector solution, it is a political sop to benefit politicians but paid for by insurers.
Unless and until we stop pretending that just because some, or a majority, of citizens ‘like’ these kinds of regulations they are sustainable we are doomed to fail. There is a reason why private insurers didn’t offer those things previously… they will cause losses and the eventual collapse of the insurance industry. (Which was the intent, truth be told. Once they bankrupt all the insurance providers, then we will have no choice but single payer… )
Don’t you think that the healthcare system is broken BECAUSE of legislation, including that which predated and led to Obamacare? When do we stop the endless cycle of regulate, fail, re-regulate, fail, regulate again? Is there some good reason to believe that this group of politicians are the health care experts who can fix everything with another program?
This. So very much this.
I think we have to wait and see what actually happens. I’m highly annoyed that we don’t have a replacement plan ready to go right away.
The problem lies in the fact that they NEVER thought that they’d actually have the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. So they never planned on ever having to actually DO this. I’m sure McConnell thought he’d still be running against Obamacare in 2032.
Why do we need to replace it?
Nobody ever demonstrated it was meaningfully broken prior to Obamacare.
It’s the nature of conservatism to be cautious, to conserve what is established, and to make government programs more efficient – not to be disruptive. Where is the discussion among Republicans to eliminate whole agencies and to spin them off to the states, for example? I haven’t heard much of it. They just want to install “better” administrators, who will function as caretakers until the next Democratic wave when they can be greatly expanded again. Then the next Republican wave will consolidate those gains and make things run more efficiently with perhaps a few changes around the edges to make government a bit less intrusive – rinse and repeat.
I made the argument in a post a couple of years ago that Republicans would be Obamacare’s staunchest defenders 20 years from when it was established. The only surprise here is that it is transpiring much sooner than I thought. The inclination to repeal Obamacare and reduce the size of government is a libertarian one, not a conservative one. Conservatives in Britain wouldn’t dream of repealing the NHS, for example. They seek only to make it better, just as Republicans will do here with Obamacare.
Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong on this, but I have little expectation of it.
We are not going back to the days of no coverage for pre-existing conditions. I get that the concept of this coverage is not really “insurance” but some kind of fund is going to have to be set up for that because removal is politically untenable, whether we like it or not. Furthermore, if you could wipe Obamacare off the face of the earth this instant, I’m guessing that you’d be left with a gigantic mess because the concept of individual health care coverage has been changed in response to Obamacare. Just getting back to the pre-Obamacare status quo is going to take some work.
I’m not defending congressional footdragging here BTW. But there are some unfortunate realities to the situation.
Lets be honest. The idea of coverage for pre-existing conditions means quite simply that those who bought insurance when they were healthy are paying for the healthcare of those who did not buy insurance until after they got sick. It is one thing to agree to share risk before the fact, and quite another to share cost after the fact. This is the reason for the huge deductibles and the ever growing premiums. SOMEONE has to pay for it… Politicians passing regulations doesn’t make it free.
People without insurance who end up with costly serious illness will have to be addressed, for sure. But that solution should NOT involve forcing those who were responsible to be in the same program as those who were not.
It may seem cold to some, but if you get seriously ill and do not have insurance, you do NOT deserve the same top rate care as someone who does. Bare minimum care, long wait times, rationed care are to be expected for someone who is indigent. It is not acceptable to force the rest of us who were responsible and carried coverage while healthy to endure those things so that those who were irresponsible can have the same level of care.
If uninsured are to be addressed, address them and leave those of us who can support ourselves out of it.
I don’t think its a good idea to try to fix the broken healthcare system with legislation. I’d prefer a phase-out of govt. control, allowing the private sector to fill the holes as they form.
Okay but that would require entirely repealing Medicare and Medicaid which have a massively outsized influence on the health care system even without Obamacare. Not to mention the hodgepodge of state-based regulations that also exist absent Obamacare. I don’t see a lot of that happening in the short term.
I’m pretty sure failure to “repeal” the ACA will doom the GOP to disaster. I’m also pretty sure GOP legislators know that. What I fear is a pretend repeal (hence the scare quotes above). I think the resulting replacement will still be 70% horrible. But that’s better than the status quo of 98% horrible.
(Is 2% non-horrible too generous to Obama?)
This is the biggest domestic mess this administration will face. I’m in favor of acting after some serious fact finding and policy discussion. We will see what happens this year.
I’d be in favor of televised national forums discussing the problems so we can have transparency about the problems, goals, resources, solutions and overall just educate the public about how darn hard it all is.
Hear, hear.
It seemed that prior to Obamacare, “broken” just meant “not socialized medicine” or “some state short of perfection”, depending on the political inclinations of the speaker, with “perfection” being everyone getting perfect healthcare, on demand, for minimal or no cost.
I’m going to stop before I work up to a rant, for which I have neither time nor inclination today.
Yes, they did. It was broken in many places. People who denied this — people with their heads in the sand — helped give us ObamaCare. I blame them as much as I blame Obama.
Trump’s signature achievement will be a natonal health system. It probably won’t be as nationalized as Canada’s. I expect it will retain some private aspects–the very rich will have some separate channels–but the real decisions will be made centrally in Washington.
What are we going to do about it? Sign up like everyone else.
The only thing I think could have been helped by anything was coverage for pre-existing conditions… not the fake-outs, but infant heart-transplants who aged out of parent coverage and lapsed on coverage because of no job or money to pay who suddenly can.
My place of employment required 6 months of coverage before they would pay PEC costs (well visit? Good to go. Broken leg, fine. Pregnancy, yup. Heart check ups? 6 months)
That seemed like a reasonable half-way but that’s because our business paid for it for employees. Outside that, I don’t know how available insurance was to those people…
One of the most unjust things ever done was to provide tax advantages for those who were part of group plans through their employers, while making self-employed people pay with after tax dollars. Aside from the fact that it was just plain wrong, it distorted the market for health care insurance. It wasn’t the only distortion, but it was one standing in the way of fixing the others.
We all knew from the get-go that once it was passed it was never going to be repealed. There was some faint hope for a while but John Roberts took care of that.
Nevertheless, it is nice to dream.
No, we didn’t all know that. It was a danger, though.
It’s interesting that Obama was able to deprive millions of Americans of health care insurance, and he got away with it.