Well, the entirety of the Republican Media Complex was hellbent on painting it as the worst thing in the world, slavery, treason and the death of America. They went all-in on it and convinced their base of it. Now they can’t deliver and at least some of those people are figuring out that, hey, I benefit from this! Those same people would still spit at the mention of Obama and many of them are still not grasping the vast gulf between what they were told and what they are experiencing. (“I’m on the Affordable Care Act, NOT OBUMMERCARE!!!”) And a lot of them bought into Trump’s “we’re going to cover everyone” bullshit.
Trump is only hellbent on repealing it precisely because it is Obama’s key legacy and as we can see, it is his primary goal as President to destroy everything Obama did.
I don’t believe this is really about blowback at the polls, although there will be some of that among Trump’s most rabid supporters. This is about blowback from big money donors. Well-heeled slime like the Mercers and the Kochs have made it clear that if they don’t get their longed-for tax cuts, they will primary Republicans in upcoming elections. It’s why Republicans – who know their abortions of “health care reform” (read “tax cut”) will do more damage to their constituencies than to anyone else – continued to try so hard to pass… something. Anything.
As I understand it, in order to do their tax “reform” (again, read “tax cut”), they must find the money to do it somewhere in order to do it by reconciliation (51 votes). The plan was to find the money with “health care reform.” IOW, tax cuts don’t happen for “tax reform” until tax cuts have already happened with “health care reform.”
They didn’t have to start with healthcare, and in fact they’re now being criticized by some of their media supporters for doing so.
But there was a big reason for it: The health care repeal bills would have cut a lot of the money that funded Medicaid, and that in turn would have given them more room on the budget.
Now they have to go to the budget without the benefit of those spending cuts they had planned on, which makes the budgeting that much harder.
(At least, that’s what I seem to remember from surfing news stories.)
By the way, with the title of the thread being “The Repeal of Obamacare/ACA: Step-by-step, Inch-by-inch,” should we conclude that it’s asymptotic, or is it that Zeno is involved?
That sounds right. But I’m still confused. They pass a budget – doesn’t it have to include all projected expenditures? Can they pass a budget that leaves out Medicaid? Because if they can’t, how can they then use reconciliation as a mechanism to repeal the ACA?
So, I just saw Charlie Dent talking about a bipartisan healthcare reform bill. While it’s not close to what I’d hoped for ( it doesn’t expand coverage), it seems like it doesn’t completely suck. Considering the dominance of the R’s in all branches of the government, it might be worth supporting.
For what I’ve managed to pick up even though it’s a little vague, the main points are
Stop the sabotage of Obamacare. Guarantee the CSR payments. I think they are reinstating the risk corridors but I’m not sure on that point.
Remove the employer mandate for small businesses ( between 50 and 500 employees). I don’t hate it. I’m assuming that any employer that is only offering insurance because they have to isn’t picking up the tab, so the employees can buy on the exchanges. Now I’m thinking that this might be a good thing as it would add a lot of healthy working people to the exchanges.
Retain and enforce the individual mandate.
Repeal the medical device tax. I’m not crazy about it, but in the spirit of compromise I think I could live with that since you have to let them repeal something, just so they can call it Repeal and Replace in order to fool Trump.
Make certain reforms to allow the states more leeway in the way they run the exchanges. I’m not sure what that means, it could be something noxious that’s a deal-breaker, or it could be innocuous- or somewhere in the middle.
So, do you this no this might be the answer, at least for now?
Lot to worry about in that last bit about leeway for the individual states, that could hide a multitude of sins. Could easily devolve into a situation where poors need to move to another state, for reasons of health. Naturally, red state Pubbies would sorely regret such an outcome as bunches of Dem voters moving away, and its unfortunate effect on diversity.
While repealing the employer mandate is a bad idea, it will likely have pretty minimal effect. So these changes are all reasonable.
I haven’t seen this proposed. I have seen giving more explicit regulatory guidance on selling insurance across state lines, which always makes me laugh because Rs are CONVINCED this will make a huge difference while insurance companies? They don’t want it. It gives the Rs something to talk about, I guess, so let them have it. It won’t matter a hill of beans.
The insurance companies don’t want selling across state lines because that will become a race to the bottom and only those companies in the states with the least regulation have a hope of winning that. It would put a lot of them out of business.
It’s more because it is really hard to form networks in states where you don’t do your primary business. Insurance is the network of providers who accept it.
And yet… Blue Cross works across state lines with little problem (it looks pretty seamless from the customer’s viewpoint, behind the scenes a lot goes on).
What would happen is that the last companies standing would be incorporated in least-restrictive states with branch offices everywhere else.