Obsessed with the need to make good on their promise to “repeal and replace ObamaCare,” but hamstrung by Democratic strength in the Senate, Republicans in Congress are looking to pass a fast partial repeal, with replacements to come later. Bad idea.
To be clear: Full replacement will likely take at least a year — both because of those Senate issues, and because it needs replacing with not just one thing, but many.
Democrats’ insistence on “fixing” everything they thought wrong in American health care in one giant bill is a key reason the ObamaCare law was such a disastrous kludge.
But any true repeal/replace effort must start with giving Americans more choices — not just killing all ObamaCare taxes and spending, as GOP leaders (especially in the Senate) seem to be planning.
Conservative activists Heather Higgins and Phil Kerpen point the way to begin: by “zeroing out penalties for selling non-compliant plans (a k a, the plans people actually want, not the ones designed by bureaucrats in Washington) by adding language to the repeal bill that is similar to that used to eliminate penalties for violating the individual and employer mandates.”
This would allow the private insurance market to begin to regenerate the millions of policies cancelled thanks to the ObamaCare law. (We also like the Higgins-Kerpen idea of a Trump executive order that would end Congress’ exemption from the law, but that’s up to the president-elect.)
The core power grab of ObamaCare isn’t the money, but the regulations — the imposition of a single kind of policy (with variety only in how much it costs in up-front premiums, vs. in co-pays, deductibles, etc.) on the entire individual market. Republicans need to kill that from the beginning, or they’ll take the blame as the system continues to sink under Democrat-written rules.
The ObamaCare exchanges are already in a “death spiral,” with premiums soaring. And the Medicaid expansion which was actually the main driver of increased coverage is headed to its own disaster — because the law bribed states to expand the program by having the feds pick up most of the cost, but only for the first few years.
The Democrats’ answers to those problems would’ve been more federal subsidies for the exchanges and the states — and/or some universal government-run system. If Republicans want to avoid being pushed to those same “solutions,” they need to revive the real health-insurance market right away.