They’ve got to be kidding. Right?
Alas, no. The Republicans still have not found a cure for
their obsessive compulsive disorder, and they’re going to take another shot at
repealing Obamacare, which, apparently, I have to explain is the same thing as
the Affordable Care Act.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) hasn’t had a chance to
score the latest proposal. It “is working to provide a ‘preliminary assessment’
of the latest Republican health-care bill by early next week but will not
estimate how the measure would affect health insurance premiums or the number
of people with medical coverage until later.” [1]
That might be a problem, because if “the Senate does not vote by the end of
next week, it will become nearly impossible to repeal the law because the drive
to kill the Affordable Care Act will lose the procedural protections that allow
it to pass the Senate with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes that
would otherwise be needed.” [2]
Republicans may thus feel pressed to push the matter to a vote (again) without
a proper CBO analysis.
The leaders of this latest effort are Republican Senators
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and their “bill
has two major elements, one that is new and one that was found in many other
Republican repeal bills this year.”
“The new element is a block grant,” which “would give each
state a fixed amount of federal money for health care and health insurance each
year from 2020 to 2026,” in an amount that “is slightly less than what the
federal government is expected to spend under the Affordable Care Act on the
expansion of Medicaid, on premium tax credits and on subsidies to reimburse
insurers for reducing the out-of-pocket costs of low-income consumers.”
What is not so new about “the Graham-Cassidy bill” is that
it “would make deep cuts in Medicaid. It would end the expansion of eligibility
under the Affordable Care Act, which has extended coverage to 13 million
people. And it would put the entire program, which serves more than 70 million
people, on a budget, ending the open-ended entitlement that now exists. States
would receive a per-beneficiary allotment of federal money.” The CBO “has
estimated that 15 million fewer people would have Medicaid as a result of
similar proposals in other Republican bills.” So we will not be out of line in
anticipating that the Graham-Cassidy bill will do the same.
One has to wonder what inspires such misanthropy, especially
since it has been carried out in such a manic fashion. But we should consider
the possibility that the greatest fear of the Republican contingent regarding
Obamacare is that it will eventually work. And it will be called “Obamacare,”
after a Democratic president.
Submitted, thus, for your observation, the worst part of
having political parties: they don’t want the other party to accomplish
anything good or worthwhile. They want to be the ones doing good, so as to
better sell themselves come election time. And they are not above actively
getting in the way of the other party doing something that will benefit the
citizenry. So the Republicans have never wanted the Affordable Care Act to
work, which is probably why many Republican governors opposed the Medicaid
expansion that came along with it.
All of this is simple and intuitive enough. But there is a
particular problem that arises in connection with Republicans and healthcare.
There are defects in Obamacare, things that need to be fixed, not least of
which is the fact that it doesn’t ensure that every citizen has health
insurance. The application of common sense discloses that covering more people
would be an improvement.
But the Republicans are largely foreclosed from taking that
route, because much of its donor base does not believe that the federal
government should involve itself with such concerns, and is also opposed to
taxes that are adequate to fund such endeavors in any event. It is, therefore,
not surprising that every substitution for the Affordable Care Act that the
Republicans come up with covers fewer people than does the current legislation,
not more.
It’s tough to be a Republican when it comes to healthcare.
If you improve on the current law, or even do nothing, you will anger your
donor base. If you make things worse you’ll have to try very hard to keep the
voters from noticing. The healthcare controversy cries out for a reform of the
manner in which we elect people to office.
