“Running On Empty”: Republicans Can’t Repeal Or Replace Obamacare, And They’re Too Scared To Fix It
More than three million people have already signed up for health insurance as of last Friday through the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). That number is growing rapidly, with 15,000 new enrollments a day in California alone.
And the Republican plan to deal with Obamacare generally remains what it has been since 2010 — repeal.
This means the millions of men, women and children covered under plans could either see their plans invalidated by insurance companies no longer required to cover pre-existing conditions or have their Medicaid coverage completely erased. Republicans who spent the last three months screaming about how terrible insurance cancelations are would have to explain what happens next for millions of uninsured Americans.
Repeal is a fantasy, a fundraising opportunity that all Republicans — except the few who take Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) seriously — know would never happen. And if it did, they would end up owning every aspect of a crumbling health care system the same way Democrats are currently responsible for every splinter in every tongue depressor.
The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent looks at recent polling and finds that though Americans are largely dissatisfied with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, they generally support the federal government’s taking a role in getting people affordable health insurance. More importantly, most are still willing to give the law a chance.
“Only 37 percent support repealing Obamacare entirely,” he writes, “while 53 percent say there are good things in the law and that changes are needed to make it work better.”
Republicans are now in what Sargent calls “The GOP Repeal Trap,” which essentially requires them to vow repeal and pray that somehow the law collapses on its own.
While it may seem absurd to those who care about governing, it makes perfect sense strategically because ”replace” is an even bigger fantasy than repeal.
Until it became socialism incarnate, the ACA was the conservative reform to the health care system. So to replace it completely, conservatives would need to go further to the right and destroy the entire employer-provided health insurance paradigm that provides about 85 percent of working adults with their coverage.
That’s what the proposal John McCain ran for president on in 2008 would have done, canceling the insurance of about 20 million Americans, four times the number who had to find new coverage under Obamacare.
Are there conservative fixes that could be made to the ACA that Democrats would be willing to trade for reforms of their own?
Health economist Austin Frakt has listed more than a dozen possible conservative-leaning fixes for the law, starting with their all-time favorite, tort reform, which actually would do very little to lower health care costs but would be a huge win for the right in their never-ending war against trial lawyers.
So why doesn’t some brave Republican — say Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) — step forward with a set of conservative reforms to the ACA?
The answer is easy: Republican primaries.
Michigan Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land suggested that the law would be fixed and was forced to flip-flop on that position in less than 24 hours, likely in fear that she might end up with a Tea Party challenger. Georgia Senate candidate Rep. Jack Kingston did nearly the exact same thing.
Christie is already saddled with being the only 2016 GOP frontrunner who accepted Medicaid expansion. If he became the face of fixing Obamacare, he would be appealing to the majority of voters but antagonizing if not actually declaring war on those in the base who refuse to accept that Obamacare is here to stay, and also refuse to consider any candidate who tells them what they do not want to hear. (Even if the governor could win the primary backed by the business and more independent wings of his party, he could end up inspiring a Tea Partier to run as a third-party candidate, virtually guaranteeing a Democratic victory in 2016.)
For the foreseeable future, Republican candidates — even those in states and districts President Obama won — are stuck running in the general election with the “problematic” stand of wanting to take health insurance from millions, some of whom may actually show up to vote.
And if they win, they can return to blaming President Obama for never making their repeal fantasy come true. It’s the only safe move.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 19, 2013
“A Right Wing Non-Plan”: Ted Cruz Reveals He’s A Thin-Skinned Wuss, Hypocrite And Policy Lightweight
Sen. Ted Cruz pretends to be a tough guy, but mostly he spends his time trashing Democrats in front of adoring right-wing crowds and conservative journalists. On Wednesday he sat down with CNN’s Chris Cuomo – you didn’t expect him to go to MSNBC, did you? – and showed himself to be incredibly thin-skinned when pressed just a little on how he would replace the Affordable Care Act he wants to repeal. It was an interesting window on Cruz’s temperament as well as his cynical, threadbare “policy” agenda.
Cuomo asked Cruz how he would replace the law he inveighs against, and as usual, Cruz dodged the question and kept on inveighing instead. Cuomo followed up. “You don’t think that you have a responsibility as a U.S. senator to do better than that, in terms of offering a solution for what to do next?” he asked.
And Cruz shot back: “Well, I appreciate your trying to lecture me in the morning.”
Cuomo didn’t leave it there.
“No, no, no, not at all, Senator. I’m worried, same as you, anybody who looks at the situation has worries.”
So Cruz tried to turn the tables. “If you’re worried, did you speak out for the 5 million people who have lost their health insurance?”
Cuomo had an answer: “Absolutely — we’ve been covering it doggedly. The problem is, I don’t have the power to fix it. You do. That’s what a U.S. senator does, is you sponsor law. You know this. It’s not a lecture, it’s a concern; I’m asking, what are you going to do about it?”
Apparently Cruz isn’t used to being grilled. Cuomo got him to share what passes for an answer from conservatives these days: “Let people purchase health insurance across state lines.”
Wow. That’s what Princeton and Harvard Law degrees get you: a warmed-over right wing non-plan that’s been around forever. As Ezra Klein reported back in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office looked at it in 2005 and found it didn’t reduce the number of uninsured and would only save the federal government $12 billion over the next eight years. (By contrast, the CBO says the ACA will reduce the deficit by $41 billion in 2013 alone.)
The CBO also found that allowing people to buy insurance plans across state lines would “make insurance more expensive for the sick and cheaper for the healthy, and lead to more healthy people with insurance and fewer sick people with insurance.” Other than that, it’s a terrific idea.
Of course, insurers like Cruz’s non-plan because it would mean a boon for the states that provide the least regulation and thus encourage the “cheapest” but least protective insurance policies. Rather than insuring states’ rights and competition, which conservatives pretend to like, it would, in effect, create a national insurance-regulation standard, as states then raced to the bottom to compete. Of course, a state’s “rights” usually diminish, for conservatives, whenever that state decides to give its citizens more power and its corporations less.
So in just one morning, Ted Cruz was revealed as a wuss, a hypocrite and a policy lightweight. The last one doesn’t matter on the right, but the first two won’t wear well in a presidential race. Kudos to Cuomo for not accepting Tea Party platitudes as a substitute for governing proposals.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 20, 2013
“What A Terrible Thing To Do To People”: Republican Attacks On Obamacare Are Turning Into An Argument Against Repeal
If health insurance isn’t important, why would receiving a letter telling you that you need to change your plan be a tragedy that can get you on Fox News nearly immediately?
Republicans have seized on the millions of cancellations of current plans happening as a result of the Affordable Care Act remaking the individual insurance market, which currently offers the worst customer satisfaction of any type of health coverage.
By glorifying these “horror” stories, which have often turned out to be overinflated at worst and actual Affordable Care Act (ACA) success stories at best, Republicans are sending a clear message to Americans: We must defend the sanctity of health insurance.
This powerful theme is extremely opportune, as long as cancellation notices are contradicting a promise the president made, Healthcare.gov is flagging and the ACA’s paid enrollment numbers are low. However, it becomes much more complicated as the site starts working and 2014 begins with millions of people enjoying health care coverage and subsidies that the GOP would be voting to take away.
This would effectively doom the “repeal” strategy Republicans have fixated on for years, argues Salon’s Brian Beutler:
Obamacare is driving policy cancellations right now, but it at least creates a coverage guarantee for those affected. Repeal without replace would impose a greater burden without providing any counterweight.
If they pass the Keep Your Health Plan Act this week, House Republicans will see their stylized sympathy for people whose policies have been canceled come into tension with their explicit desire to take Obamacare benefits away from many of the same people, and millions more.
Becoming the party that opposes all cancellations of insurance policies also completely undermines any Republican “plan” that might be an alternative to the ACA. “Such a starting position would make true market-oriented reform impossible,” explains The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein.
John McCain’s health care plan, one part of his platform conservatives love, would have ended health care tax exemptions for employers and employees. This would have likely resulted in millions and millions of Americans ending up in new plans. The Republican Study Committee has offered a “serious” Obamacare alternative that would try to end the system of employer-based health care, disrupting the current health care system far more than the ACA does.
Even as Republicans are vindictively leaping on any cancellation story, other right-wing groups are trying to spread the idea to people in their 20s to optout of the ACA, even though millions of younger Americans can get coverage for free. One Koch-funded group, Generation Opportunity, brought its scary Uncle Sam and some models to tailgate before the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game to let the students know that opting out of health insurance is, as the kids say, cool.
So health insurance is lame and having it changed in any way whatsoever is the greatest atrocity an American can be expected to suffer.
Republicans have been fine with these kinds of contradictions throughout President Obama’s time in office. The deficit suddenly became a problem on January 21, 2009. Tea Partiers demanded that we get our gubmint hands off their Medicare. The GOP won the House by campaigning against cuts to Medicare that they then included in Paul Ryan’s budget.
But there is evidence that efforts to actually take something away from Americans results in a substantial backlash.
The wave of voting restrictions across the South after the 2010 election was mostly blocked by the federal courts empowered by a Voting Rights Act that had not yet been gutted. But Republicans did successfully restrict early voting in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida. Despite this, or as a result of it, African-American turnout hit an all-time high in the 2012 election.
North Carolina passed some of the most radical voting restrictions on students in the nation and local Republicans specifically attempted to block Elizabeth City State University senior Montravias King from running for city council where he was attending college. Their efforts backfired.
“On October 9, King was elected to the Elizabeth City city council, winning the most votes of any candidate,” The Nation‘s Ari Berman reported. “He’s now the youngest elected official in the state.”
Students must have figured: If voting weren’t important, why would Republicans be doing everything they can to stop me from doing it?
In only 10 states, 444,000 people have already signed up for Medicaid. The fact that the GOP would deny them and about five million more poor people health insurance isn’t big news for a couple of reasons.
First, they’re poor. Second, these people haven’t had anything taken away from them — yet.
But on January 1, the story changes. Suddenly Republicans will be trying to do exactly what they’re accusing President Obama of: taking away health insurance with nothing to replace it. And thanks to the GOP, now it’s clear what a terrible thing that is to do to a person.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 12, 2013
“The Party of Me, Me, Me”: The Republican Push To Defund Obamacare Is Just Selfish And Vindictive
Recently, Republicans have shown that their disdain for Obamacare is stronger than their level of caring about the American people, as evidenced by their wanting to shut down the government if there is not a one-year delay in implementating this legislation.
Seriously, tenacity is one thing, but acting like a bunch of spoiled brats at the taxpayer’s expense is not what Americans sent those politicians to Washington to do. Despite 40 votes to repeal, defund, etc., the GOP shows once again that it’s the main attraction at the circus, for they must know this is all for show. The Democratic ruled Senate is not going to vote in favor of such a proposal and, clearly, the president would not sign the law if it made it to his desk.
And are we forgetting the majority of Americans who voted for the president both in his first and second runs for the White House? Doesn’t the population who wants, and for many needs, the Affordable Care Act count? I guess not.
Whether it’s egos, their careers or the inability to stand apart from their terribly fragmented party, Republicans still shows they are the party of no, the party of the rich and the party of the inability to play nice with Democrats to do what is in the best interest of all Americans.
Having said that, we here on the left have been asking: if you want to repeal and replace this piece of legislation, what are you replacing it with? Well today, that has been answered.
A group of House Republicans is going to unveil legislation providing an expanded tax break for consumers who purchase their own health coverage and increasing the government funding for high-risk pools. What the GOP has clearly forgotten is one of the reasons the Affordable Care Act was passed, was because it’s, well, …. affordable!
Has the GOP seen the rates being put forth by the big insurance companies? My husband, my two children and I pay nearly $2,000 a month for our PPO plan; and we are all healthy, thankfully.
The proposal, which was endorsed by the Republican Study Committee, provides a tax credit to people who buy coverage that is approved for sale in their state. The GOP says the American people could claim a deduction of $7,500 against both their income and payroll taxes, regardless of the cost of insurance.
But there are several big problems here. 1) Who decides what is “approved” for sale and based on what criteria? 2) You are giving the states the power of dispensing insurance, but the states can’t afford to. 3) What happens to federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the numerous states that hold their hand out for their check from Uncle Sam, including some GOP-led states such as New Jersey and Florida? 4) Millions of Americans who should pay their taxes do not. Now you want more people to pay less? And you constantly talk about our deficit and how our government can’t pay its bills? 5) This program is not fair. If one person has a very low-rate plan and is healthy, they can deduct as much as someone paying triple who might not be. And lastly, 6) If Obamacare is difficult to implement and there was much criticism on the delay of this plan, how would the complexity of this proposal be any less?
The RSC claims a membership of 175 members, about three-quarters of the House Republicans. I wonder, have all 175 Republicans read what’s in it?
Let’s face it. This party is angry. They’re angry a black guy won. They’re angry the black guy got his team to draft and pass health care reform, badly needed in this country. So they want their version, their turn to “win”; that is what this is about. This is not in the best interest of the health of America’s people, nor the health of our economy. If we turn the tables on the GOP, will their plan be a “job destroyer,” as they have suggested Obamacare will be? What’s the start date of their plan? Will there be any glitches?
The bottom line is, Obamacare has been passed. To hold the country financially hostage and threaten to shut it down if the GOP doesn’t get its way and its version of a piece of legislation that is already law is not good leadership; it’s selfish. Is that what America needs in Washington today? I don’t think so.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, September 20, 2013
“Weight Loss, No Exercise”: Four Years Later, The Second Half Of The Republican “Repeal And Replace” Plan
At his press conference late last week, President Obama chided congressional Republicans for voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act several dozen times without offering a credible alternative. “They used to say they had a replacement,” he told reporters. “That never actually arrived, right? I mean, I’ve been hearing about this whole replacement thing for two years — now I just don’t hear about it, because basically they don’t have an agenda to provide health insurance to people at affordable rates.”
Au contraire, Republicans responded.
The 173-member strong Republican Study Committee is on track to roll out legislation this fall that would replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act with a comprehensive alternative, Chairman Steve Scalise told CQ Roll Call on Thursday.
Though it wouldn’t be the first Obamacare repeal-and-replace proposal floated by individual GOP lawmakers in either chamber of Congress, the RSC bill is one that could at least gain traction on the House floor, given the conservative group’s size and influence.
Oh good, it only took four years for House Republicans to come up with a health care plan they like.
So, what’s in it? No one outside the Republican Study Committee actually knows, and even the RSC isn’t altogether sure since the plan isn’t finished. But Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the RSC, insists some of the popular provisions in “Obamacare” will remain intact, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
“We address that to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be discriminated against,” he told Roll Call. But, he promised the bill would not “put in place mandates that increase the costs of health care and push people out of the insurance that they like,” Scalise said.
In related news, the Republican Study Committee has a weight-loss plan in which everyone eats all the deserts they want and never exercises.
Look, it’s extremely difficult to craft a health care system that protects people with pre-existing conditions while eliminating mandates, scrapping industry regulations, and keeping costs down. Indeed, it’s why Republicans came up with mandates in the first place — the mandates were seen as the lynchpin that made their larger reform efforts work.
Indeed, it’s partly why Democrats used to push so hard to see the GOP alternative. Dems assumed, correctly, that once Republicans got past their talking points and chest-thumping, they’d see that actually solving the problem required provisions that some folks wouldn’t like.
But let’s not pre-judge, right? Maybe the right-wing members of the Republican Study Committee have figured out a creative way to help those who can’t afford coverage and protect those with pre-existing conditions and reduce health care costs and cut the costs for prescription medication and cover preventive care and cut the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars — just like the Affordable Care Act does. What’s more, maybe they’ll do all of this without raising taxes and/or including elements in the plan that are unpopular.
I seriously doubt it, but I suppose it’s possible.
What seems more likely to me, though, is that the Republican Study Committee will eventually finish and unveil their “Obamacare” alternative and invite side-by-side comparisons between the two approaches — which will in turn make the Affordable Care Act look even better.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
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