Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Attention Republicans in Congress: Voters Will Repeal and Replace You!
The failure to get Obamacare’s repeal and replace puts our Republican majorities in the House and Senate in danger – not from Democrat challengers, but from the wrath of angry Republican voters and Trump supporters. If any Republicans lose in 2018, I pray it’s in the primaries to an “I’m not a wuss” challenger, and that these new candidates get elected the following November. The last thing I want is a Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer.
The only chance they have now is to go for total repeal first. What we had before Obamacare was far better than what we have now. The next step would be to introduce necessary reforms to the system, the biggest (to me) being able to buy across state lines. It works for auto, home, and life insurance. All the other stuff (deregulation, high risk pools for pre-existing conditions, etc.) can be done at a later date.
Heck, I’d vote to repeal if I were in office. It ain’t so hard – they did it several times already – man up! Maybe if our elected officials in Congress were limited to one term (didn’t have to worry about reelection), they’d do the right thing . . .
Published in General
I hear you, Stad, and I certainly want to see ObamaCare repealed. But even if the Republicans fail to do that, I’m still not voting to re-elect Al Franken!
Repeal now or repeal the gop. Good advice.
I’d also pull all of congress’ health insurance.
Yeah there is that problem.
All insurance is regulated by the states. Would they all have to agree to allow purchase of health insurance across state lines?
I’m not clear on that, either. Is it that states expressly keep out health insurance companies that aren’t headquartered within the state, or is it just that most states have such a mountain of red tape to sell health insurance that only a small number of insurance companies want to bother expanding to more states? If it’s the former, that would seem to violate the commerce clause and ought to be ruled unconstitutional, right?
A few facts. The Senate has that sticky cloture rule. A bill to repeal would require a 60 vote majority to end debate or they could to amend the existing bill (passed under a fiscal exception to the cloture rule) and strip it of all its language. The ACA bill was originally passed that way; a House bill (all funding bills must originate in the house) was stripped and sent to the Senate where the Obamacare language was added by amendment and passed, avoiding cloture using the legerdemain of its origin. So, the bill can be stripped once again and replaced later using the same silliness. I’d prefer that we just drop the cloture rule altogether and go back to slugging it out at the pols.
And every state has its own department of insurance and its own insurance rules and regulations. Auto insurance is pretty straight forward, so the major insurers have no problem getting their policies approved in most states. Health insurance is a lot more complicated and the state rules are a lot more complicated. That’s not to say that the states can’t get together and agree to standards of policy coverage. They can. But health insurance has evolved well beyond reimbursement for cost. It has turned into prepaid healthcare. And it’s a huge mess. Part of what Obamacare tried to do is mandate standard health care policy benefits for everywhere.
The market will determine the best insurance and delivery system. Perhaps the federal government should tell states that they cannot dictate health policy benefits and let the markets work. But this will be disruptive as the insurance and provider industries struggle to find their way.
The Republican Congress really needs to give me a reason to show up in 2018. So far they are failing. They have lost my time and my money, I will not donate or volunteer. It remains to be seen whether they can keep my vote. (I won’t vote Democrat but I don’t have to vote Republican)
@jager, I think your attitude is common, understandable and correct. Every primary challenger in the GOP, countrywide, should simply run on “I’ll repeal the monster.” There’s nowhere for the spineless GOPe simpletons to hide now. The emperor’s wardrobe is on full display. Goes without saying that Ryan and McConnell are done in leadership, a word they defile by their behavior.
How complicated is it to pass a law freeing up companies to sell across state lines? Trump constantly talked about this during the campaign, yet we barely hear anything about it from Congress these days. Surely, health insurance would be covered by interstate commerce rules.
A simple bill to allow Health Insurance companies to offer any insurance at all would leave Obamacare in place, and undermine its foundations in a matter of months.
Keep it simple. Make liberal Republican senators stand up and refuse to allow people to buy whatever insurance they want to buy.
My targets include:
Susan Collins and John McCain. I will have to do some looking into House races, but I do think Paul Ryan is making the list.
Senators Paul, Johnson, Lee, Portman, et al:
We created a new Senate sub-committee just for you. You will run the capitol waste management sub-committee. Seriously, Mitch can invent a committee so unappealing that these snowflake Senators would do anything not to have to serve on it. There’s gotta be a million other ways to punish naughty Senators. Trump is pushing a primary challenge of Jeff Flake. I think all these snowflakes need to be primaried. I wanna see some heads cracked!
60 votes, good luck.
That’s with the current rules. The rules were written by men, surely they can be unwritten?
Then if we lose everything, we have single payer.
The congressmen and senators voting against repeal are not thinking about the nation or the Republican Party. They are thinking about their own reelection. The nation may suffer, the Republican Party may become a permanent minority, but they will be reelected. If you do not care about your country, it is hard to argue against that logic.
Then take away their campaign money. Do you really think Rand Paul is the only Republican who can win a Senate race in Kentucky? As a Kentuckian, I supported his primary opponent in 2010. He’d have been a sure yes vote on this bill.
Ha! Like you would expect bitter infighting not to turn into a win for the Democrats. How many witches and legitimate rape candidates do you think this batch will turn up. Or maybe it will be filled with iron conservative stalwarts like Mike Lee, and Rand Paul!
Woops…turns out you can only beat this horse so long before it dies of irony. These are the insurgents you voted for dummies. You think the next batch will be better? The party machine was broken to make way for the “rabble” but the party machine was the only thing keeping the politicians in line and voting as they were told by leadership.
I’m 100% in the “repeal the damn thing already” camp, but with one caveat:
Amend HIPPA so that having been insured under an individual plan allows you to continue coverage despite a pre-existing condition the same way coverage under a group plan does.
The roughly $40,000 I’ve paid for Obamacare coverage the past three years ought to be worth that much.
It’s already actually possible, but Congress in this one, inexplicable case for some unknown reason has continually decided to defer to the states. It’s entirely possible that (and IANAL) an Executive branch regulation could open this up without Congress.
Hey, I’d say it’s at least as likely to be found Constitutional as declaring a fine a tax (despite the actual bill originating in the Senate). Let’s try it.
What federal law would need to be repealed in order for this to happen?
As I thought, none:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/24/news/economy/interstate-health-insurance-obamacare/index.html
That’s what I’m afraid of. It will require uniform regulations across the nation, removing states’ ability to regulate insurance sold within their borders. And any time you set up a uniform regulatory environment like that, it means winner-take-all (or most) of the market, because of economies of scale. And from there it’s a small step to single decider insurance, because 1) with less competition there will be fewer choices and there will be an outcry against the winner, and 2) the health care system will be a huge step further along the path to complete centralization.
Have you seen Robert Costa’s tweets on this matter? (I find Costa to be about the only reliable/trustworthy Capitol Hill reporter, especially when it comes to Republicans. Sad that a Washington Post reporter has to resort to twitter to publish actual interesting news.)
He claims that a large number of Republican Senators privately aren’t worried about primary challenges over the failed Obamacare repeal, because a majority of their base voters have already moved on from the issue.
While it’s easy to laugh at this news as just another sign of how out-of-touch Republican Senators are, the fact of the matter is that most of them have now been re-elected numerous times (far too many), while all of us in the peanut gallery have precisely zero successful Senate elections combined. So they obviously know a thing or two about what their constituencies really want.
This is where Republican voters are deluding themselves: there is very little appetite among the electorate as a whole to go back to the pre-Obamacare status quo.
Remember that one of the most central pillars of Obamacare is “if you have a pre-existing condition, insurance companies won’t be able to price you out of healthcare”. Every poll shows that this sentiment is wildly popular among the electorate.
The old system was good for many, just “meh” for the majority, but an absolute nightmare for a sizeable minority. Of course, many of us on places like Ricochet are in the minority who did much better under the old system than Obamacare, and we’re blinded to the fact that there is a much larger group (including many Republican voters) that is profiting from Obamacare.
That’s not a defense of Obamacare by any means, just a reflection of the current political reality in the US.
I guess we’ll finally see whether Republicans will get blamed for the collapse of a law they universally voted against. It’s always been an interesting political science question. Republicans were right about Obamacare being a very bad idea. Is that enough to avoid the blame? I can’t wait to find out.
It doesn’t matter how many times we replace sitting members of Congress. They cannot tackle already existing highly complicated legislation. The most they can do is log role toward improvements. Only strong leadership from the White House can bring about such changes but that requires a President deeply engaged in policy. Trump has yet to learn this and probably doesn’t understand the real issues we conservatives consider so important. We should just give him the win, but create space where free market solutions can emerge. I think Cruz’s amendment does this.
Insurers and providers really don’t want to reduce the money in healthcare if it means they get less. It would be natural because growth is what businesses do. We don’t want to call drs. businessmen, but they are. The way things are going, we are just going to keep re-arranging the deck chairs, kind of like the funk education is in. The bottom line is both of these sectors contain well paid employees and lobbyists.
No they will not avoid the blame for what ever bad out come happens when Obamacare collapses, nor should they.
They told us since the day it passed, that they would repeal Obamacare. Voters gave them control of Congress and the White House. They did not repeal Obamacare, they proposed a weak bill to try and fix the law and then could not pass it.
They own this mess now because they did not live up to their promises and they did nothing to truly fix the problem.
It’s Congress that passed a law allowing States to regulate health insurance, so they can always repeal it. The States have no say in interstate commerce. Just think about life insurance or home appliance insurance — there are no state lines.