I’ve written about this many times over the years, but let’s go over it again. There are many reasons why the Republican Party has developed as a skeptic of federal power, but the most important is that they spent most of the 20th Century as the minority party in Congress. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidential election in 1932, his Democratic Party took control of the House and the Senate, too. The Republicans were thereafter shut out of power in Congress until 1980 with two brief exceptions.
After World War Two ended, there was an economic contraction. Over in the United Kingdom, it cost Winston Churchill his job as prime minister. Here at home, it cost the Democrats control of both houses of Congress after the 1946 elections. It was expected that it would cost President Truman his job, as well, but the 80th Congress was proved so radical that Truman dubbed them the “Do-Nothing Congress,” ran against them, and won an upset victory in the 1948 election. The congressional Republicans had blown their chance after one term and were tossed out.
Their second chance came in 1952 when they were swept into power in the midst of the unpopular Korean War on the coattails of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Once again, however, they demonstrated their inability to govern. In the 1954 elections, they lost both houses again.
It would be more than a quarter century before the Republicans won back the Senate in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide. They would lose that majority as soon as those freshmen’s six-year terms were up in 1986. After the 1954 debacle, the House was lost to the GOP for fully forty years. Their turnaround was the so-called Gingrich Revolution of 1994.
Since 1994, the Republicans have controlled Congress more often than not, and given the demographic and geographical distribution of party support in this country, they should expect to control Congress more often than not far into the future. Over time, we should expect them to become less skeptical of federal power because they usually get to decide how to spend the money. We should expect them to get better at legislating, and to become protective of legislation that they’ve passed.
However, it has now been more than twenty years since the Gingrich Revolution and the Republicans seem to be moving in the opposite direction in every respect. They just lost Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Eric Cantor because the simple act of trying to pass a budget and pay our bills on time was too unpopular with their base. Rather than becoming skilled legislators, they’re always on the brink of shutting down the government or causing a national default.
During the Obama Era, they voted eleventy billion times to repeal Obamacare but now that they have the power to do it a right-wing rag like the Washington Examiner has to explain to them that their plan is stupid and foolish.
Congress must repeal Obamacare. It must also simultaneously replace Obamacare.
Repealing without replacing is an enticing strategy to many Republicans. But it would be error.
“Repeal and delay” is the name for the course of action many congressional Republicans favor. Under this strategy, within days or weeks of President Trump taking office, Congress would pass a bill repealing Obamacare on a future date, perhaps years down the line. Then, with the clock ticking, Republicans would try to force Democrats to go along with a replacement bill.
This is unwise for many reasons.
What’s the first reason that “Repeal and delay” is unwise?
Nobody who has followed Congress in the past 20 years should believe Republicans would win a test of congressional brinkmanship. Past journeys to the edge of disaster have always ended with GOP surrender, typically after heaping servings of scorn.
Gingrich-era government shutdowns, Tea Party government shutdowns, flirting with the debt limit: none of them were GOP victories.
Let’s revisit those GOP defeats for a minute. It’s true that Gingrich lost his epic government shutdown battle with President Clinton and that it helped Clinton recover from a rocky start and win reelection. But the congressional Republicans didn’t lose their majorities over it. The congressional Republicans basically lost their shutdown battles with President Obama, too, but they didn’t lose their majorities in 2012 and were massively rewarded for them in 2014.
The Republicans have had tremendous success with what they know best, which is being a very good minority party. They can counter-message and use procedural tools in obnoxiously innovative ways to obstruct. They can simply refuse to even hold hearings for presidential nominees or insist that those positions don’t even need to be filled. They excel at this stuff, but they do not excel at legislating or doing oversight of the federal government and its agencies.
Their plan here is the plan of a minority party. They want to force the Democrats to do something rather than figuring out a way to do it themselves. They have no idea how to replace Obamacare without blowing up the private insurance industry, costing hundreds of thousands of people their health insurance, and taking all the political blame. So, they’ll just try brinksmanship and maybe those clever law-writing Democrats will rescue them at the end of the day out of some bleeding heart do-gooder sense of decency.
But, as the Examiner points out, their plan to repeal Obamacare is another example of not being good at this legislating thing. They like that they can get around a Senate filibuster by using the Budget Reconciliation process, but the only things that can be included in a Budget Reconciliation bill are things that affect the budget. So, they can repeal the way revenues are raised in Obamacare but they can’t repeal the regulatory scheme that makes it tick.
And that leads to the third reason that the Examiner thinks the “Repeal and Delay” strategy is moronic. Creating this kind of uncertainty in the insurance market will lead to chaos, dropped plans and higher premiums, for which the Republicans will be blamed.
“The political firestorm that would ensue from several million people losing their insurance,” write Joe Antos and Jim Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute, “could be enough to force the GOP to reverse course and take steps to provide some kind of emergency insurance for this population, which could be even more costly than the ACA.”
Economically, repeal without replace could prove awful policy, too. Insurance is all about risk. If insurers have no idea what will happen in a year, but they know something big will happen, that increases their risk, which could further increase the premiums they charge.
There’s a substantive problem here, too, which is that the Republicans have lost the courage of their earlier conviction that people simply shouldn’t get any help buying health insurance. It’s morphed into the idea that Obamacare is a bad law because it’s constructed poorly. The GOP doesn’t have the balls to argue that people with pre-existing conditions should lose their insurance. They might be willing to get more stingy with subsidies for lower income people, but not to eliminate subsidies altogether.
The result is that they need a law that does what Obamacare does, but one that they can call something else.
My advice is to repeal Obamacare and then pass the exact same law and have Trump sign it.
Problem solved.
The Republicans have been dead-set against the ACA since Day One but couldn’t create a repeal until trump made it a campaign promise and won. Of course, he has no cohesive plan and the Republicans don’t either. Again, it’s the story of the dog catching the car and not knowing what to do with it.
I wonder how loudly the trump supporters will squeal when the Republicans start changing the ACA and it affects them. Will they stand behind their new president out of sheer spite, because We Won! We Won! Or will they show any amount of displeasure or regret? I think a large margin will continue to support him and grit their teeth and somehow blame the Democrats. It’s how they do things. What will be infuriating is what lengths they will go to in destabilizing a system that, while flawed, was actually helping millions of people.
And that’s what they hate.
Good article, Booman
They might squeal but they’ll blame all of it on Obama and Democrats.
Some will, some won’t.
Trump can’t afford to lose supporters.
So the only things the GOoP can do via reconciliation are refuse to use the Obamacare revenue-raising devices and refuse to fund the subsidies? Presumably Trump can issue an order that the federal gub’mint will not enforce any provision of the regulatory scheme as unconstitutional, but that wouldn’t stop other entities (state AGs, etc) from suing to enforce the law, I suppose.
Repubs seemed to think that they could end Obamacare via reconciliation, but simply taking away the money would be even worse for insurers and blow the market up even more effectively.
It’s amazing that supposedly professional politicians and their advisors and think tanks could have painted themselves into such a corner. They are afraid to simply present the pre-2009 “free market” status quo as the Golden Era, it seems. One would think they would patriotically assert (as they have for years) that Obamacare wrecked our Glorious System, and that we simply need to return to the halcyon days of the Holy Free Market in health insurance–which required no federal regulation. They then present a law, the Health Care Freedom Act, repealing Obamacare in its entirety, prohibiting state regulation of health insurance and permitting sale of health insurance across state lines, pass it in the House and then force the Dems to filibuster it in the senate. Repeal and Replace, voila!
Then, if Dems do filibuster it, end the filibuster for health care-related bills. Or else throw up their hands, condemn Dems, end the charade, continue to blame Dems for wrecking the system and obstructing reform and demand that the incompetent white electorate elect enough Repubs in 2018 to render a filibuster impossible. Problem solved.
Then move on to the real event, the abolition of all pollution and environmental controls and Job Creatin’ tax cuts for the wealthy—which is all the plutocrats really care about. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about health care for the American rube.
If the Repubs were smart, they would repeal the ACA, then replace it with the exact same thing only now it’s called something like “Trump’s Totally Awesome Healthcare Plan For Real ‘Murkins”.
Their base would love it because in their minds, the main problem with the ACA is the Unforgivable Blackness associated with it.
You get points for expressing it more succinctly.
If they were really smart they would either forget the whole thing or tinker with it so they can say they “saved” it. But these idiots are simpletons ….really. Now how can they blame the democrats?
One should never forget that the reason the Republicans can’t come up with an alternative to Obamacare is because OBAMACARE IS A REPUBLICAN NOTION of health care reform. And it was pushed up in the belief that it might actually attract some bi-partisan support. Oh well on that bi-partisan sprit…
It’s also why every time that a Republican describes what their ideal system would, it sounds a lot like Obamacare.
As most here know, it was essentially based on what Mitt Romney did, and it must have really fried Mitt that his glorious achievement in Massachusetts went from being a National Model For Health Care to a Kenyan Socialist, Job-Killing Takeover of US Health Care in the blink of an eye.
But not fried Rmoney enough to actually defend it as the Repub nominee in 2014, haha!
He was a paragon of moral and intellectual courage and integritude, of course…
Let’s not give all the credit to Romney for the Massachusetts reform; advocacy groups played a big part in making it happen, and the heavily Democratic legislature did much of the actual work of drafting the plan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_health_care_reform#Legislation
When the donald signs the bill that cuts funding for ACA/Obamacare and repeals the law every Dem needs to go on cable and local tv and proclaim the end of ACA/Obamacare and the beginning of Trumpcare. Make him take ownership.
You have gone over this before but everything old is new again. Specifically the Holman rule revived in the rules package. It allows amendments to slash the pay of individual federal works and programs to as low as $1.
They may not be able to “repeal and replace” or “repeal and delay”, but I suspect there are many actions that they can take (or not take) to make obamacare collapse, and then plausibly claim that it was inevitable and thus not their fault.
Not an expert on this, but I’ve read that if Trump merely fails to sustain opposition to House vs. Burwell, the negative decision in that case will stand, thus eliminating some of the reimbursements to insurers. Not sure if that will do Obamacare in–maybe not. But I am certain that in life there are far more ways to fuck things up than to make them better.
I hope their monkeying around kills the insurance companies.
Single payer here we come
consolidation is a complicating factor
It won’t happen.
Too much money in Big Insurance and its allies/satraps, Big Pharma and Big Med. It would crash the entire economy…Venezuela-style. Then there would be rebellion. The very last thing that the Permanent Government wants is rebellion.
It’s alway bad for profits, don’tcha know…
AG
Right, repeal is also bad for profits, including doctors. Just one more reason they can’t and won’t repeal it. But I expect much noise and attempt to blame the democrats – for something. Still wouldn’t it be nice if the replacement were single payer?
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”-An old Irish proverb.
Still true today.
Single payer will not happen until the entire economic system of this country…politico-economic system, to be more accurate…undergoes some sort of real revolution.
For single payer to happen, either the political system must be completely changed…purged of all big money control…or some sort of massive collapse of the society itself must happen. (Probably a serious economic breakdown or some other kind of national emergency.) The first option is totally unlikely because of big money control of the media and the concomitant huge expense of a successful campaign (although Trump’s [relatively] inexpensive win may have backed that off a little), and the second option would probably be precluded by the simple fact that in an emergency of that sort, as the U.S. now stands a military/police state would probably arise.
“Be careful what you wish for…you might just get it.” An old American proverb.
“The Devil lies in the details.”-A proverb from every culture on earth.
Like dat.
AG
transparently obvious all along that the primary objection to Obamacare has been his name associated with it as his signature accomplishment.
Ironic that it was the wingnuts who initially insisted on that association, i.e., on referring to the ACA as “Obamacare” while lying massively about it to make/keep it a negative in the eyes of their rubes.
Obama famously predicted that once its success became apparent (including to many of those rubes — who gained coverage under it in spite of their rubitude), the wingnuts would lose their zeal for calling it, with dripping disdain and derision, “Obamacare”.
That prediction hasn’t fully come to fruition yet, but that awakening is already underway, including among dupes who voted for Trump, with growing signs among elected GOPers of recognition of the trap they created for themselves.
Thus torpedoing profits and angering an important constituency.
Republicans don’t care what happens to people but they care a great deal about powerful corporations.
They wouldn’t even be in control of Congress if Democrats didn’t feel exactly the same.
This is the point in the debate at which a group within the Democratic Caucus could outline two choices for replacement for Obamacare:
Either of these proposals should include comprehensive vision, dental, and other heathcare service currently paid totally out of pocket or through specialized separate insurance coverage.
And no deductibles, no co-pays, no lifetime limits…
In exchange, people would have available some pretty intense preventive programs with clinic evidence of prevention. And those programs are primarily those devoted to some substantial lifestyle changes. That requires support of research to figure out how to massive get the public to adopt those changes in lifestyle; nagging doesn’t work; we now have evidence from the current out-of-pocket-cost-sharing system that having financial “skin in the game” doesn’t work either.
It would be directly from general revenue tax funds, be a requirement for Congressional funding each year (mandated budget item) and would be linked to major tax reform that restores progressive taxation.
It would be simple, understandable, practical, controversial, and popular. Because it would aim at cutting US healthcare GDP costs in half, or less if the US restored the number of frontline healthcare jobs required for quality care and reduced all of the overhead in managed care and private insurance (especially executive salaries, marketing costs, billing and collections costs and the IT costs associated with all or it.)
Democrats should have, but likely don’t have this sort of legislation in model form; they should have made the case after 1993, but didn’t.
It is based on these principles, which should be familiar:
I suspect that at this point the Democratic Party is so far gone that what would have been uncontroversial for most Democrats (outside the South) during the Truman administration are now highly controversial.
It’s a shame. They are not prepared to have a strong alternative to what Trump and the GOP Congress will do. And a lot of Americans will wind up getting hurt for their 10 years of cowardice on health care.
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